Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0520077431

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


How could early modern Venice, a city renowned for its political freedom and social harmony, also have become a center of religious dissent and inquisitorial repression? To answer this question, John Martin develops an innovative approach that deftly connects social and cultural history. The result is a profoundly important contribution to Renaissance and Reformation studies.

Martin offers a vivid re-creation of the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics—those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform and whose ideologies ranged from evangelical to anabaptist and even millenarian positions. In exploring the connections between religious beliefs and social experience, he weaves a rich tapestry of Renaissance urban life that is sure to intrigue all those involved in anthropological, religious, and historical studies—students and scholars alike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Currents of reform ideas. The most prominent and the most widely diffused is what students of Italian religious life have come to 27. I do not entirely deny many claims of poststructuralist theorists that texts are the products of linguistic structures, but such arguments-especially Derrida's claim that "il n'y a pas de hors-texte"-result in absurd reductions of all historical experience to text. For a thoughtful response to what she aptly calls the "semiotic challenge," see Gabrielle M. Spiegel,.

Purgatorio et cosl tutte le altre cose l'ha udito a dir a Venetia" (ibid.). 138 Venices Hidden Enemies another, either in response to the demand for workers or to escape debt, or as a result of religious persecution-is considerable. 28 In addition, this mobile world was a relatively tolerant one as well. Paolo had no trouble continuing to live as a heretic, at least not until the late 1560s. At some earlier point, probably in 1559, he left Modena for Venice where he once again found work in.

Hierarchical Society For though the artificial conception of man's activities which prompts us to carve up the creature offlesh and blood into the phantoms homo oeconomicus, philosophicus, juridicus is doubtless necessary, it is tolerable only if we refuse to be deceived by it. ... A society, like a mind, is woven ofperpetual interaction. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society E vangelical, Anabaptist, and millenarian ideas filtered into Venice in a variety of ways. Itinerant priests and friars who had.

Control of the Mediterranean was not contested, their deepest concerns were less economic than religious. 68 What mattered to them most was the restoration of religious and political unity. And what led them to make this religious choice rather than the choices made by the Anabaptists was in all likelihood less their social class than their specific cultural experiences--experiences that had been informed by an Italian millenarian tradition. Ultimately, then, class is a necessary but by no means.

Parish church opened onto the piazza San Marco, the city's ritual center, and a crowd would easily be attracted. "This act of penance," Facchinetti wrote after learning that the Venetian government had given its blessing to a public ritual, "will serve as a check 'and instill fear in the others." He planned to send familiars of the Holy Office "who shall observe with care the movements, the gestures, the expressions, and the words of those who go to witness this spectacle." 8 Facchinetti was not.

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