Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice

Horodowich, Elizabeth Language and statecraft in early modern Venice / Elizabeth Horodowich. - Cambridge : Cambridge university press, 2008. - XI, 245 p. ; 24 cm ISBN 97805-218-9496-8 Soggetti: VENEZIA - Usi e costumi - Sec. 16. | POLITICA - Linguaggio - Venezia - Sec. 16. | LINGUA - Sec. 16. ISBN : 97805-218-9496-8 Descrizione libro: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Condizione libro: BRAND NEW. 9.25 by .83 inches. (258 pages) This book demonstrates that a crucial component of statebuilding in Venice was the management of public speech.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.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.While historians typically describe the state as emerging through a wide variety of processes and structures such as armies, bureaucracies, and administrative organizations, this book demonstrates that a crucial but unrecognized component of statebuilding in Renaissance Venice was the management of public speech: controlling foul language. Ideas about language were deeply embedded in Venetian political culture. Instead of studying the history of language through literary, printed texts, Horodowich examines the speech of everyday people on the streets of Renaissance Venice by looking at their actual words as recorded in archival documents. By weaving together a variety of historical sources, including literature, statutes, laws, chronicles, trial testimony, and punitive sentences, Horodowich shows that the Venetian state constructed a normative language - a language based not only on grammatical correctness, but on standards of politeness, civility, and piety - to protect and reinforce its civic identity.1. Defining the art of conversation, 2. Regulating blasphemy, 3. Insults, 4. Conversation and exchange: networks of gossip, 5. The language of courtesans. Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice will appeal to literary scholars in its attention to rhetoric, language, and speech acts, as well as its focus on the body and etiquette, it will appeal to cultural historians in its rich use of different sources, its colorful, textured vision of the society and 'everyday life,' its attention to different strata of society and the connections among them, and its focus on the social history of speech, it will appeal to political historians in its focus on statecraft, and it will appeal to social historians in its mining of the archives and careful evaluation of how to use the sources uncovered. This is, in sum, a fascinating, sophisticated, wide-ranging, and beautifully written book. -Douglas Biow, University of Texas, Austin Elizabeth Horodowich's subject is the talk of Renaissance Venice and in this book she finds stimulating meanings in the conversation of Venetians of every category, patrician and popular, rich and poor, female and male. Threaded throughout Horodowich's discussions of speech of all kinds is a provocative thesis: that the patrician government sought to discipline the use of words in order to enforce a cultural Venetianness that sustained its regime. She braces this original account of the Venetian government's social policy with a sophisticated theoretical framework. But the main achievement of the book is a vivid and comprehensive examination of the entire linguistic circulatory system of Renaissance Venice. -Stanley Chojnacki, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Speech and language were important elements