Benjamin Arbel, TAU

This seminar will focus on social aspects of Venetian history during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

A. General framework: the main developments that marked Venetian history during the Renaissance: the expansion seawards and landwards; the cultural transformations of the Italian Renaissance; military confrontations in the Mediterranean and in Italy; global economic changes related to the Age of Discoveries; the rise of the modern state.

B. Venice’s institutional development.

C. Definitions: Renaissance, social group, class, family, clan, caste, citizenship, republic, oligarchy.

D. Social groups in Venetian society:

1. The patriciate, its main social characteristics. The patrician clan and family, the brotherhood (fraterna), economic activities, political functions and social strategies.
Patrician women - their role within their families and in building family alliances.

2. The cittadini (citizens) - their social and economic role, their relations with the patriciate and their functions as civil servants.

3. The popolani: artisans, servants, seamen, arsenal workers, women, and slaves. The social and economic roles of the guilds and the religious fraternities; migration and naturalization.

4. Foreigners: Greeks and their place in Venetian society; Jews: the institution of the Ghettos and its significance; other minorities (Slavs, Albanians, Armenians).

E. General issues:

1. The religion of the Venetians: patterns of devotion, institutional and popular devotion; Church and State relations; the role of monasteries in Venetian society; the organization and functions of parishes.

2. The transformation of Venice’s economy and their social significance: trade, industry, finance and agriculture.

3. Venetian elites and Renaissance culture

Teaching method:
Interactive seminar, preliminary readings of chapters from the bibliography or of articles from the course pack are required for each session. Discussions are based on bibliography and on illustrative documents, prepared in advance. Two written exams: one intermediate and one for final evaluation. Recommended preliminary reading: D.S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, London 1970.

Bibliography (only books by alphabetical order. For articles - see course pack):

Chambers, D. The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580, London 1970

*Chambers, D. and Pullan, B., Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-1630. Oxford UP, 1992.

Chojnacka, Monica, Working Women in Early Modern Venice, John Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London 2001.

Chojnacki, Stanley. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore and London, 2000.

Davis, Robert, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City, John Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London, 1991.

Davis, Robert C.; Ravid, Benjamin C., ed. The Jews of Early Modern Venice, Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore and London 2001.

Ferraro, Joanne M., Marriage Wars in Late Renasissance Venice, Oxford UP 2001.

King, Margaret, Venetian Humanism in the Age of Patrician Dominance, Princeton UP 1986.

Kittell, E.E.; Madden, T.F., ed. Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Urbana & Chicago, 1999.

Lane, Frederic C. Venetian Ships and shipbuilders of the Renaissance, John Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London 1934. Reprinted 1992.

*Lane, Frederic C. Venice: a Maritime Republic, Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London 1973.

Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice. Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent, John Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London 2003.

Logan, Oliver. The Venetian Upper Clergy in the 16th and early 17th Centuries: a Study in Religious Culture. Lewiston, 1996.

Martin, John. Venice's Hidden Enemies. Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1993.

Muir, Edward, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, Princeton UP 1981.

Queller, Donald, The Venetian Patriciate, Reality versus Myth, Urbana Ill. 1986

Riccoboni, Bartolomea. Life and Death in a Venetian Convent. The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini 1395-1436. Edited by D. Bornstein, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago 2000.

Romano, Dennis. Housecraft and Statecraft. Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600, John Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London 1996.

Romano, D; Martin, J. ed. Venice Reconsidered. The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore & London 2000.

Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, University of Chicago Press 1992.

Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Oxford UP, New York 1985.

Ruggiero, Guido, Violence in Early-Renaissance Venice, New Brunswick 1980.

Ruggiero, Guido, Binding Passions. Tales of Magic, Marriage at the End of the Renaissance, Oxford UP, New York 1993.

Biography
BA in Middle Eastern History and General History (TAU), PhD in History (Hebrew University, Jerusalem). Full Professor at the Department of History and founder and Director of the Program on Renaissance Studies at TAU. Member of the editorial board of the “Mediterranean Historical Review” and “The Medieval Mediterranean”. Member of the Commission for the Publication of Sources on Venetian History at the State Archives of Venice. Published extensively on Venetian overseas possessions with particular focus on Cyprus, and, more broadly, on the Later Middle Ages and the Reanaissance, the Mediterranean World and on the Jews in the Levant and in Italy. Author of the books: Trading Nations. Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (Brill, Leiden 1995), xi+237 pp; Cyprus, The Franks and Venice (13th-16th Centuries) (Ashgate, London 2000) (Variorum Collected Studies Series CS 688), xii+332 pp.; The Italian Renaissance: The Emergence of a Secular Culture (Tel Aviv 2000), 144 pp. [in Hebrew].