1. First published in 2007 by Oxford University Press with the
resounding title Information &
Communication in Venice. Rethinking Early Modern Politics, this
substantial work of Filippo De Vivo is now published in Italian by Feltrinelli
in a completely renewed version. While the English edition began with a general
description of the different spheres of the Venetian political communication in
the early modern period (XVI-XVII c.), from the aristocratic arena of the
government to the popular boatos running from a barber shop to a coffeehouse, this second edition focuses on the Interdetto affair (1606-07) and
assumes this event as key-case to understand the functioning of political
information in an early modern Italian city. This choice appears very effective
and has a great significance for the Venetian historiography: if after the
Second World War the study of Interdetto was one of the main topics
which marked the renewal of the studies on the republican politics, the
Anglo-Italian scholar aims at unfolding a new season of research on the history
of the Serenissima Republic, more opened toward an approach of historiographical
comparison on a European scale.
In 1606 the pope excommunicated
the doge and the Senate and proclaimed a general interdict on divine services in
the Republic’s territories. At the beginning, the dispute was
jurisdictional: it concerned the right of the Republic to restrict the
clergy’s right to acquire land, or to judge clergymen arrested on criminal
charges. Nothing new: these issues were well-known occasions of tensions between
the European state and the papacy, for centuries normally regulated through
diplomacy and in secret. On the contrary, in 1606 both sides transformed the
dispute in a total war of political communication in which the pope tried to
give large resound to his interdict, whereas the Republic, at least in the first
period, followed the strategy to deny every publicity to it. After the first
months, the conflict was massively publicized by both, launching and
unprecedented pamphlet campaign. In the words of Paolo Sarpi “a kind of
war by writing”: more than 150 pamphlets were printed in more than 200
editions.
2. Analysing all the means of
communication used in the ‘war’ – oral, handwritten and
printed – De Vivo upsets the traditional opinion over a crucial matter:
the role of the Venetian populo in the
Interdetto affair and its degree of participation in the political discourse.
According to Gaetano Cozzi’s masterly works on the Interdetto crisis, for
example, the conflict (breaking) between the republican regime and the papacy
had been driven by a radical party inside the patrician political arena (the
Young, “i giovani”) in a
context of reputed exclusion (non-involvment) of the popular masses to the
reasons of the politics. With the only exception of some higher-middle classes
functionaries or merchants, the Venetian people have always been thought as a
sort of dead body, exposed to false news and propaganda.
De Vivo’s effective
reconstruction explains the different steps of the communication policies of the
two governments and the role played in the dispute by the existence of a public
audience: while the Venetian governors aimed to exclude the effectiveness of the
interdict reassuring the population through public ceremonies and official
documents, the Roman curia inundated the territories of the Republic and the
international public opinion with any form of information media: letters,
manuscript copies of the papal Monitorio containing the interdict, manuscript newssheets and sermons. The
information apparatus generated or oriented from the top provoked a feed-back
from below, in the form of graffiti, posted texts (often in rhyme),
rumours, private and semi-public discussion.
The author devotes a great
attention to all these media giving a vivid description of the social actors
implicated in the political communication, and demonstrating, against the abused
cliché of the secrecy of the Venetian politics, that the political sphere
involved a large part of the urban male population: patricians, secretaries and
functionaries, merchants, printers, professional scriveners, news writers,
tavern-keepers, professional informers, men of the intelligence, barbers, dental
surgeons, apothecaries. The identification of the people who actually took part
in that communication is made possible by the reports of the Inquisitors’
informers, and allows to individuate the locations of the political
communication: not only the broglio (e.g. the St.Mark’s Piazzetta where patricians met to discuss the
government’s issues and tamper with elections), or the ridotti where the high-society gambled
and found prostitutes, but also in the street, especially in Rialto or San Marco
where spontaneous concourse of people (called bozzoli, silkworm cocoons) gathered in
conversation, in printers’ workshops and bookshops, textile stores,
taverns, coffeehouses, barbershops, apothecaries. The space of politics acquires
therefore a concrete dimension upsetting many of the conventional ideas about
the closeness of the status groups of the early modern society and the
exclusiveness of the political discourse.
3. A great emphasis in this study
is put on the pamphlets’ war which immediately gave the Interdetto a
European resound. It started in Venice, which, in that period, was still one of
the main centres of European printing industry, but in terms of titles and
editions Rome soon outdid the Serenissima. The explosion of printed books was
due to the converging interests of professional writers, political patrons, and
publishing entrepreneurs and involved different categories of authors:
theological champions of the dispute as Paolo Sarpi or Roberto Bellarmino;
medium-level experts writing for a cultivated public; anonymous writers that
quickly understood the economic relevance of the business (also writing in
dialect). Production and distribution numbers are astonishing: in four days one
thousand copies of Cardinal
Bellarmino’s in quarto book were
sold, so that thousand more were immediately printed in ottavo. Working in Rome and
Florence’s libraries, Filippo De Vivo could update the number of pamphlets
published in both capitals to the impressive number of 155 titles and 321
editions, double the previous list (all titles are included in a precious
bibliographical appendix), for a total figure of 300.000-600.000 copies. The
sixteenth century Venetian society did not absolutely lack news: they were
numerous, were exchanged at a great speed, and, overall, they were considered
goods of great economic value. What was missing was accuracy: nobody, not even
the authorities of the semi-absolutists States, had the possibilities to verify
the correctness and truth of what was of public dominion.
This study follows a recent but
rich tradition of researches on the history of book and of other means of
information that has expanded remarkably in the last decades with regard to the
study of political information in early modern Italy. Starting from the notion
of ‘information society’ (R. Darnton), it concentrates on a single
city, shrinking the chronological and geographical span, taking into
consideration all means of verbal communications, until now separately studied,
to show how they constantly interacted with each other. The work of Filippo De
Vivo propounds itself as a «radical experiment» (p. 24), described in
the Introduction with a more mature historiographical awareness than in the 2007
British edition. The lesson of the “thick description” (C. Geerz),
as far as this methodological issue is concerned, reveals therefore to be
fundamental, so as the contribution of Carlo Ginzburg, credited as
«intellectual model».
4. Another important target of
criticism is the concept of “public opinion”, that in the famous
work of Jürgen Habermas (1962) was directly connected with the rise of
political freedom. De Vivo’s analysis includes ample evidence that: a) in
sixteenth-century Venice, i.e. a couple of centuries before the Enlightenment,
there were a lot of places where public political discussion was possible; b)
the political sphere included a wider part of the society and not only the upper
classes; c) the proliferation of means of communication and places for
discussion does not automatically imply the widening of popular participation or
the creation of its prerequisites. The model of the birth of “public
opinion”, that has been extremely successful amongst historians of early
modern Europe, is therefore rejected because based on an idealized notion of
communication, that considers the public sphere as something separated - or
better opposed to – the State. At the same time the book demonstrates that
political communication in the old regime society cannot be considered only in
terms of ‘propaganda’, that is unidirectional communication from the
top, aimed only at ruling purposes.
In conclusion, this skilful
reconstruction of the complex, actual reality of political communication in
Venice during the Interdetto crisis successfully seeks to conceptualize a new,
and for many aspects surprising, vision of politics in the late Renaissance and,
finally, of our vision of early modern society. A challenge that deserves to be
accepted.