This book demonstrates that a crucial component of statebuilding in Venice was the management of public speech. Using a variety of historical sources, Horodowich shows that the Venetian state constructed a normative language - a language based on standards of politeness, civility, and piety - to protect and reinforce its civic identity.

For the first time in a generation, leading scholars of medieval and Renaissance Venice join forces to define the current state of the field and to reveal in its rich diversity. Forays into neglected aspects of Venetian studies reveal new insights into coinage and concubinage, the first Jewish ghetto and the Fourth Crusade, and matters from dowry inflation to state spectacle to cheese...

Schmitt demonstrates that the commedia dell'arte relied as much on craftsmanship as on improvisation and that Scala's scenarios are a treasure trove of social commentary on early modern daily life in Italy.

'A great effusion of blood' was a phrase used frequently throughout medieval Europe as shorthand to describe the effects of immoderate interpersonal violence. Yet the ambiguity of this phrase poses numerous problems for modern readers and scholars in interpreting violence in medieval society and culture and its effect on medieval people. Understanding medieval violence is made even more complex by the multiplicity of views that need to be reconciled: those of modern scholars regarding the psychology and comportment of medieval people, those of the medieval persons themselves as perpetrators or victims of violence, those of medieval writers describing the acts, and those of medieval readers, the audience for these accounts. Using historical records, artistic representation, and theoretical articulation, the contributors to this volume attempt to bring together these views and fashion a comprehensive understanding of medieval conceptions of violence. Exploring the issue from both historical and literary perspectives, the contributors examine violence in a broad variety of genres, places, and times, such as the Late Antique lives of the martyrs, Islamic historiography, Anglo-Saxon poetry and Norse sagas, canon law and chronicles, English and Scottish ballads, the criminal records of fifteenth-century Spain, and more. Taken together, the essays offer fresh ways of analysing medieval violence and its representations, and bring us closer to an understanding of how it was experienced by the people who lived it.

In this highly original book, Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of the first-century BC Roman Republic and veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war. The study centres on the body of the soldier, the cultural production of images and representations of gender which advance theoretical discussions around war, masculinity and violence. Mlambo employs a transcultural comparative approach based on a persistent factor found in both societies: land expropriation. Often articulated in a framework of patriarchy, land appropriation takes place in the context of war-shaped masculinities. This book fosters a deeper understanding of social processes, adding an important new perspective to the study of military violence, and paying attention to veterans' claims for rewards and compensation. These claims are developed in the context of war and its direct consequences, namely expropriation, confiscation and violence. Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe contributes to current efforts to decolonise knowledge construction by revealing that a non-Western perspective can broaden our understanding of veterans, war, violence, land and gender in classical culture.

Emphasizing on the one hand the reconstruction of the material culture of specific residences, and on the other, the way in which particular domestic objects reflect, shape, and mediate family values and relationships within the home, this volume offers a distinct contribution to research on the early modern Italian domestic interior. Though the essays mainly take an art historical approach, the book is interdisciplinary in that it considers the social implications of domestic objects for family members of different genders, age, and rank, as well as for visitors to the home. By adopting a broad chronological framework that encompasses both Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and by expanding the regional scope beyond Florence and Venice to include domestic interiors from less studied centers such as Urbino, Ferrara, and Bologna, this collection offers genuinely new perspectives on the home in early modern Italy.

During the Counter-Reformation, inquisition manual authors working in Italian lands adapted the Catholic Church's traditional tactics of inquisitorial procedure, which had been formulated in the medieval period, to the prosecution of philo-Protestants. Through a comparison of the texts of four such authors to contemporary inquisition processes, Jane K. Wickersham situates the Roman inquisition's prosecution of philo-Protestants within the larger framework of the complex religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. Identifying the critical role played by ritual practice in discovering and prosecuting heretical subjects, Wickersham uncovers two core reasons for its use: first, as a practical means of prosecuting a variety of philo-Protestant beliefs, and second, as an approach firmly grounded within the Catholic Church's history of prosecuting heresy. Finally, Rituals of Prosecution provides an in-depth examination of the inquisitorial processes of urban residents from humble socio-economic backgrounds, providing new insight into how the prosecution of ordinary people was conducted in the early modern era.