War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice

This highly original work redefines the place of war and empire-building in the making of early modern Venice.

Anastasia Stouraiti (Author)

9781108838443, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 January 2023

320 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.6 kg

Weaving together cultural history and critical imperial studies, this book shows how war and colonial expansion shaped seventeenth-century Venetian culture and society. Anastasia Stouraiti tests conventional assumptions about republicanism, commercial peace and cross-cultural exchange and offers a novel approach to the study of the Republic of Venice. Her extensive research brings the history of communication in dialogue with conquest and empire-building in the Mediterranean to provide an original interpretation of the politics of knowledge in wartime Venice. The book argues that the Venetian-Ottoman War of the Morea (1684-1699) was mediated through a diverse range of cultural mechanisms of patrician elite domination that orchestrated the production of popular consent. It sheds new light on the militarisation of the Venetian public sphere and exposes the connections between bellicose foreign policies and domestic power politics in a state celebrated as the most serene republic of merchants.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Chronology
Introduction
1. War, Information, and Popular Consent in Seventeenth-Century Venice
2. Making History: Official and Popular War Historiographies
3. Printed Images and the Visual Culture of the News
4. Documentary Poetics and the Literary Public Sphere
5. Reclaiming Ancient Greece: Plunder and the Imperial Regime of Antiquities
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Military history [HBW], European history [HBJD]