Information And Communication In Venice

Communication in the government -- Communication in the political arena -- Communication in the city -- Communicative transactions -- The system challenged : the interdict of 1606-7 -- Propaganda? : print in context

Venice Reconsidered offers a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchical, the scholars in this volume present a more fluid and complex interpretation of Venetian culture. Drawing on a variety of disciplines—history, art history, and musicology—these essays present innovative variants of the myth of Venice—that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories Venetians told about themselves.

The history of espionage is far older than any of today's intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The first mention of espionage in world literature is in the Book of Exodus.'God sent out spies into the land of Canaan'. From there, Christopher Andrew traces the shift in the ancient world from divination to what we would recognize as attempts to gather real intelligence in the conduct of military operations, and considers how far ahead of the West - at that time - China and India were. He charts the development of intelligence and security operations and capacity through, amongst others, Renaissance Venice, Elizabethan England, Revolutionary America, Napoleonic France, right up to sophisticated modern activities of which he is the world's best-informed interpreter. What difference have security and intelligence operations made to course of history? Why have they so often forgotten by later practitioners? This fascinating book provides the answers.

The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and circulation of identities based on religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, and status as free or slave within three distinctive Mediterranean geographies: islands, entrepôts and empires. Individual essays explore such topics as interreligious conflict and accommodation; immigration and diaspora; polylingualism; classical imitation and canon formation; traffic in sacred objects; Mediterranean slavery; and the dream of a reintegrated Roman empire. Integrating environmental, social, political, religious, literary, artistic, and linguistic concerns, this collection offers a new model for approaching a distinct geographical region as a unique site of cultural and social exchange.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

In 1644, the news that Antonio de Montezinos claimed to have discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel in the jungles of South America spread across Europe fuelling an already febrile atmosphere of messianic and millenarian expectation. By tracing the process in which one set of apocalyptic ideas was transmitted across the Christian and Islamic worlds, this book provides fresh insight into the origin and transmission of eschatological constructs, and the resulting beliefs that blurred traditional religious boundaries and identities. Beginning with an investigation of the impact of Montezinos’s narrative, the next chapter follows the story to England, examining how the Quaker messiah James Nayler was viewed in Europe. The third chapter presents the history of the widely reported - but wholly fictitious - story of the sack of Mecca, a rumour that was spread alongside news of Sabbatai Sevi. The final chapter looks at Christian responses to the Sabbatian movement, providing a detailed discussion of the cross-religious and international representations of the messiah. The conclusion brings these case studies together, arguing that the evolving beliefs in the messiah and the Lost Tribes between 1648 and 1666 can only be properly understood by taking into account the multitude of narrative threads that moved between networks of Jews, Conversos, Catholics and Protestants from one side of the Atlantic to the far side of the Mediterranean and back again. By situating this transmission in a broader historical context, the book reveals the importance of early-modern crises, diasporas and newsgathering networks in generating the eschatological constructs, disseminating them on an international scale, and transforming them through this process of intercultural dissemination into complex new hybrid religious conceptions, expectations, and identities.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.