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Padua and Venice : transcultural exchange in the early modern age
Venice and Padua are neighboring cities with a topographical and geopolitical distinction.Venice is a port city in the Venetian Lagoon, which opened up towards Byzantium and the East.Padua on the mainland was founded in Roman times and is a university city, a place of Humanism and research into antiquity.
eBook
The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice
The gorgons had thus the same effect as paradoxes. For
paralysis means: immobility; and immobility: to be unable to observe
(Niklas Luhmann).Niklas Luhmann,
“Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” Paradoxien,
Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K.
Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 58. Recently,
the “paradoxical” character of sixteenth-century Venetian
politics and culture has become the focus of attention among scholars
of early modern Venice. In her book on City Culture and the
Madrigal at Venice, Martha Feldman states that “Venice
was above all a paradoxical city,” given the “divided
consciousness” of Venetians whose urban culture oscillated
“in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpoise” to contemporary
court culture.Martha Feldman, City
Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California
Press, 1995), 10. Margaret Rosenthal has examined how
Veronica Franco, poetess and prostitute in sixteenth-century Venice,
portrayed herself as an “honest courtesan,” ingeniously
appropriating the oxymoronic Venus-Virgin paradigm in Venetian
iconography.Margaret F. Rosenthal,
The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer
in Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press,
1992). According to Edward Muir, the doge's
“two contrasting personae, one so humbled and the other
so splendid,” were the complementary features of a
“paradoxical prince.”Edward
Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton
University Press, 1981), 261. I would like to contribute to
this debate by analyzing how the social practice of marriage among
the patriciate and the language of perfection in sixteenth-century
political discourse followed the logic of paradoxical constellations.
Rather than arguing for a causal connection between social practice on
the one hand and political theory on the other, I propose to apply one
analytical framework to investigate the paradoxical qualities of
different social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena which
were at the center of politics and society in Late Renaissance
Venice.
Journal Article
Legal and Political Discourse in Seventeenth-Century Venice
In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies.J. Sperling, “The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 3–32, at p. 16. I am uneasy when historians (or anthropologists for that matter) insist that the “real” significance of what people said and did was inaccessible to them at the time, a position that might be described as methodological atheism and which is generally associated with functionalism (although Sperling's analysis is more like “dysfunctionalism”). By contrast, like Clifford Geertz, I would argue for methodological agnosticism. I do however entirely agree with Sperling that the “second serrata . . . institutionalized tensions between mutually exclusive requirements” (5), and that the paradoxes of Venetian political discourse were “both constitutive and destructive of the political system” (32). Sperling's approach can also be contrasted with S. Chojnacki, “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 12977mdash;1797, (J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Baltimore, 2000, 263–94), which sees patrician marriage legislation as part of a positive programme of self-definition. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.”Sperling's article includes full bibliographic references to the literature on the “myth of Venice.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.
Journal Article