Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice
Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice
£38.99
GBPWhile 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.
- Studies the history of language not just through texts but through the words of real people in sixteenth-century Venice
- Uses original archival research
- Recounts the blasphemies, curses, swear words, insults, and slander that everyday people hurled at one another
Product details
March 2011Paperback
9780521178365
258 pages
229 × 152 × 15 mm
0.38kg
Available
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Table of Contents
- 1. Defining the art of conversation
- 2. Regulating blasphemy
- 3. Insults
- 4. Conversation and exchange: networks of gossip
- 5. The language of courtesans.
