The Practical Politics of Humanism in the Venetian Mediterranean

• In Event: Legitimation and Subversion: Humanism and Renaissance Statebuilding II

Abstract

The men who governed the Venetian Mediterranean empire were patricians who had often been educated as humanists before embarking on their imperial careers. In this paper, I’ll discuss how some of these governors used humanist reading and textual practices to define the space they were governing and their own roles as governors. These men were neither great scholars nor important governors, and they did not use humanism to legitimate their rule or to make theoretical claims about empire. Rather they read their Latin texts subjectively and idiosyncratically, in order to make sense of their particular dilemmas of governance. As I explore, their writings - primarily letters and marginalia - indeed often subverted the “party line” elaborated in Venetian humanist histories, treatises, and orations. I put forward a local, contingent, and above all highly subjective picture of the political uses of humanism by the ordinary scholar-governors who made up the offices of the maritime state

Author

• Erin Maglaque, University of Oxford