Addressing a large audience, Claire Judde de Larivière manages to draw up a precise picture of the city and the Venetian company at the start of XVIe century, without giving up the nuances and precautions of scientific research.
This small volume offers a condensed of recent historiography and renewed on the Venice of the beginning of the modern era, while offering its readers a walk in the city. With Venetian ! Venetian !the historian thus manages to prolong and bring together in one work the approaches which characterized his last two publications: the adoption of a narrative frame in Snow ball revolt and attention to social knowledge of those who live in the city in The ordinary knowledge.
“” It is a sweet illusion to have the impression that we stroll there in the past »»
The taste for the story is reflected in the device adopted throughout the thirty-three chapters of the work, because we follow the Pasqualin Durazin public crier in his tour which took him from one corner to the other from Venice from January 3 to 24, 1520. It was alongside Durazin, therefore, that Claire Judde de Larivière leads us in this “ Crossing a city Announced by the subtitle.
The structuring in an urban course inevitably recalls the genre of the tourist guide and one can actually consider leafing through the work during a stroll in the lagoon city. The richness of illustrations (all times) does not make the displacement necessary to assess and visualize what is described, not to mention that – the historian recalls it regularly – the current Venetian configuration should not be too illusion of the many modifications under the city during the five centuries which separate us from this public crier: “ The city plays tricks on us, it is misleading and it is a sweet illusion to have the impression that we stroll there in the past (P. 56). The fact remains that, historical explanations by hand, we can easily find the palaces, inscriptions, facades or even names of streets and places mentioned in Venetian ! Venetian !.
However, and it seems that this is one of the volume manufacturing keys, spatialization as well as other strong methodological choices are not only functional to organize the comments. This is the case, for example, for the use of the voices of the people, a choice all the more significant as it is at the heart of conceptual and methodological reflection conducted in the previous work of the historian, The ordinary knowledge.
The intention to exhume the social knowledge of the inhabitants of Venice to the XVIe century goes through a reading of the documentation from the archives of theAVOGARIA Di Comun which contain a series of files reporting interrogation and testimonies collected for trials in appeal. It is thus one of the rare bias by which one can reconstruct the word of these Venetians and Venetian to which Durazin is addressed during her street proclamations. The chronology being similar, the historian also summons some of them to try to give voice and body to the audience of the public crier: the young Franceschina battered by a blacksmith of the Arsenal, Francesco accused of having learned a five -year -old child or even the Jew Jacob who did not hesitate to file a complaint after being insulted by two patricians.
City crossing and spatialization
Put in space the historical discourse, to locate it in the urban topography is to relate to one of the lines of force of this historiographical renewal which the author more generally intends to account. We can think in particular of “ spatial turning ” Or “ Spatial Turn », Proposal first Anglo-Saxon and rather from the history of science and social sciences. This approach, with epistemological and disciplinary contours much larger than its adoption by history, is illustrated here in all the simplicity of what it brings to historical discourse: the possibility of restoring an experience of space which is determined first and foremost by the actors who travel it.
Thus, for the chiefs of Durazin-the health provists and the wise waters who established the proclamation route-a logic specific to their intentions prevailed: receiving the greatest number of Venetian inhabitants meant not being limited to the two usual locations of the public cry, but draw up a list of more than eighty steps in the whole city. It is difficult to imagine them having looked at a pretending map representing the city according to mathematical criteria (a map of a production in any case still very rare at the time). Rather, they had to call on their daily attendance of these places, attendance which also authorized a much greater social mix in the medieval city than in the contemporary city, and which therefore allowed these men from the patriciat (representing less than 5 % of the population) to know where and how to touch the people, these “ popolani To which Durazin belonged.
The didactic ambition of the volume, however, leads to spraining this spatialization of the space purely traveled and lived. The desire to allow readers and readers a better apprehension of Venice from the beginning of modern times is manifested by scale games: we thus pass from the microcosm of a campiello Venetian to practices and phenomena having concerned all European urban societies of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, a frequent background of the chapters of the work.
These games of scale are in turn to reflect an intention that has animated historiography for a few decades: that of emancipating itself from the expression of an all Venetian exceptionality, which has nevertheless crossed the writing of the history of the Serenissime of the medieval chronicle to the present day. Even if it is difficult (for historians as well as for tourists) not to rave about the millennial longevity of a society and a political system having set foot in one of the most hostile natural spaces of the Italian peninsula, the warnings against the illusion of “ Venice myth »(Reiterated here on page 228) are necessary to recall that Venetian splendor and prosperity are also the result of a construction, and especially a political construction.
Represent and represent Venice
In the development of this self-representation participated in particular the Jacopo de ‘Barbari card and the paintings of Bellini, Carpaccio and Mansueti which accompany our “ crossing From the city by illustrating the work: representations that were none other than projections of what we had to see, know or think of Venice. The pictorial works chosen, however, also have merit-beyond their undeniable aesthetic qualities-to contribute to this dive into the daily life of the Venetian Renaissance since they all belong to this genre qualified by the historian of American art Patricia Fortini Brown as “ narrative painting “Who shares, with the work of Claire Judde de Larivière, the intention of staging” profane subjects of a sacred history »(Page 38).
Finally, it should be noted that the spatialization of the crossing of Venice follows more a daily use of the city then than that of a contemporary tourist: we want as proof that the obligatory passages like the Rialto or the Place Saint-Marc are only mentioned in the second half of the work (chapters 20 and 25 respectively). Not that their importance was less at the time of Durazin, but, by definition, to follow his steps means to experience a space in space where the hierarchy of places is not dictated by their prestige.
An ancient ecological question
Spatial journey up to men or women and vintage testimonies therefore allow the work to respond to this ambition, announced from the foreword, “ repopulate the city of the people who lived it »(Page 10). Proof that historiographical plans and contemporary ethical questions meet since the repopulation of the city is one of the major challenges of the Venice of XXIe century, a challenge that touches the field of politics as well as ecology – two of the great themes that cross Venetian ! Venetian !. Even if apparently isolated in the treatment of the final chapter (“ A pioneer ecological policy ? », Pages 273-280), the ecological question underpins the entire system and the subject since the proclamation of Durazin concerns regulations on the evacuation of wastewater: subject whose triviality must not mask the importance in a city where water quality, then as today, is the only guarantee of the lifetime of its underwater structure.
The Venetian specificity is resurfaced here, to bring us the pioneering example of a history where political decisions have never been able to ignore concerns for the environment. The micro-history of this public crier of the Republic of Venice is also the affirmation of a legitimacy of the State to regulate human behavior in the face of a nature which, in the lagoon ecosystem, can be considered other than a common good, in the first sense of res publica SO. There too, the exception should not be an illusion: the very need to constantly reiterate these rules and proclaim them to the four corners of the city is symptomatic of their certainly limited respect.
The question of politics crosses the whole volume since diving into reborn Venice alongside a public crier is, by definition, to experience a politicized space. Here too, the Republic offers models and counter-models, but the daily practices of collegiality, elective functions occupied by rotation and deliberations taken by consensus can give the thought. Other themes still provide proof that history provides useful counterpoints to the political debate. We will refer in particular to chapter 18 on migration flow control strategies or in chapter 32 on the control of public hygiene in the event of an epidemic.
The Venice of Durazin and its audience, as reconstructed by Claire Judde de Larivière, is therefore not a picturesque Venice whose inhabitants and customs are discovered – in addition to the churches, channels and palaces already well known – but a Venice crossed by intentions and requirements whose works by historians and historians of the past decades highlight all contradictions and The complexities, returned here in a rigorous and located narration.