The Anxieties of a Citizen Class the Medieval Mediterranean
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The Anxieties of a Citizen Class The Medieval Mediterranean Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400–1500 Managing Editor Frances Andrews St. Andrews Editors David Abulafia, Cambridge Benjamin Arbel, Tel Aviv Hugh Kennedy, SOAS, London Paul Magdalino, Koç University, Istanbul Olivia Remie Constable, Notre Dame Larry J. Simon, Western Michigan University VOLUME 99 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mmed The Anxieties of a Citizen Class The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370–1480 By Kiril Petkov LEIDEN • BOSTON 2014 Cover illustration: Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo (Academia Gallery, Venice). With kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali: Soprintendenza Speciale per Patrimonio storico, artistico, etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Venezia e dei comuni della Gronda lagunare, Venice. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petkov, Kiril, 1964– The anxieties of a citizen class : the miracles of the true cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370–1480 / by Kiril Petkov. pages cm. — (The medieval mediterranean ; v. 99) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25915-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25981-2 (e-book) 1. Venice (Italy)—Church history. 2. Miracles—Italy—Venice—History. 3. Holy Cross— Legends. 4. Scuola grande di San Giovanni Evangelista (Venice, Italy)—History. I. Title. BR878.V4P48 2014 305.5’5094531109024—dc23 2013039016 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0928-5520 ISBN 978-90-04-25915-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25981-2 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing and IDC Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... vii Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 1 Setting the Stage: The Privilege of the Donation of the Cross ............................................................................................................ 15 2 Upward Bound: The Vendramin and the Miracle of the True Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo ................................................... 27 3 Relics, Business, and Nature: The Miracle with Andrea Vendramin’s Oil Ships ........................................................................... 47 4 Church, State, and Sainthood: Francesco Querini and the Miracle with the Demoniac ................................................................. 67 5 Drawing a Line between Citizen Classes: Regimenting the popolani in the Miracle at the Bridge of San Lio .......................... 89 6 Healing the Sick, Helping the Poor: Service and Identity in the Miracle of the Daughter of Nicolo di Benvegnudo ............... 105 7 The Miracle of Paolo Rabia: The Rise and Fall of Entrepreneurial Leadership ................................................................ 123 8 The Merchant of Brescia: Incorporating the terraferma in the Miracle of the Son of Giacomo de Salis ........................................... 151 9 The Body Feverish and the Body Politic: Medicine, Politics, and Religion in the Healing of Piero de Lodovico ........................ 177 10 Maritime Empire, Mobility, and Cross-cultural Identity: The Miracle of Antonio Rizzo ............................................................. 205 11 The Miracle of Alvise Finetti’s Boy: Finance, the State, and the Future of the cittadini originarii ........................................................ 235 vi contents Conclusion Method, At Last ..................................................................... 251 Appendix Incunabulum 249bis (ex. 222), Museo Civico Correr, Venice, ca. 1490 ............................................................................................ 261 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 269 Index .................................................................................................................... 285 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The bulk of the research for this study was supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, first with a short-term grant for study of Venice and the Veneto and then with a Research Fellowship. The University of Wisconsin-River Falls contributed three Faculty Development grants for summer work in Venice and granted me a sabbatical leave to complete the research. Mariella Annibale, Federico Bauce, Steven Bowd, Monique O’Connell, Jonathan Glixon, Eileen Korenic, Claire Judde de Larivière, Lawrence Mott, Reinhold Mueller, and Chris Schabel have been generous with sharing their expertise and supplying information. David Jacoby and Alan Stahl backed my attempts to obtain funding. I thank the staff in Venice’s Archivio di Stato for their efficiency and assistance. Special thanks are due to Ann Welniak, who performed interlibrary miracles to procure hard-to-obtain readings. Joanne Ferraro helped with finding accommo- dation and Elsa dalla Venezia has been a gentle host. Mialisa Moline and Patrick Tobin edited the text thoroughly and saved me from many stylistic blunders. Ultimately, very little would have been accomplished without the support of my good friend Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, and I would like to use the occasion to express my most sincere gratitude to her. An early version of the material now incorporated in Chapters 2 & 5 was published as “Relics and Society in Late Medieval and Renaissance Venice: The Miracles of the True Cross at the Bridges of San Lorenzo and San Lio,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes/Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies, 19 (2010), 267–82. The concepts infor- ming these chapters were broached in two talks offered in 2010 and 2011 at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Kiril Petkov INTRODUCTION This study examines the mental outlook of a social class, its preoccupa- tions and anxieties, and its fears and expectations as reflected in a small but representative cross-section of its membership. The aggregate in ques- tion is the top segment of Venetian commoners, the cittadini originarii, the closest approximation to an urban upper middle class in the social fabric of the Serenissima. The timeframe includes the period of that class’ gestation, the fifteenth century, soon after the serrate of the Great Council excluded commoners from the political franchise. This era occurred just before an increasingly assertive state shaped the elite citizens into a, more or less, corporate caste. In between the serrate and the state’s assertive movement occurred an era of qualified fluidity, hopes for assimilation into the political oligarchy, anxieties about what shored up the cittadini’s identity, competition for rank within the group, and sometimes painful adjustments to the transformations of economic, social, and political life. Above all existed the expectation that the cittadini were free to shape their own identity—an identity to which their financial muscle, manage- rial skills, and relationship with the divine entitled them.1 A fluid and constantly enriched group, the cittadini underwent a grad- ual process of identity formation. This formation roughly mirrored that of 1 Two clarifications are due at the outset. First, I am using the term “class” in the loose meaning of an aggregate of individuals of roughly similar socio-economic and political standing vis-à-vis the rest of society, and sharing in a specific mode of articulating their experiences. Members of the aggregate may or may not display, through a reflective dis- course, a sense of belonging that would make them a sociological group. As this inquiry hopes to demonstrate, they did share a set of expectations and cultural dispositions gener- ated by similar conditions and pressures even before socio-political impact molded them into a clearly defined group with the consciousness of belonging. The theory of shared experiences as a class-formative principle was offered, with deep conceptual flaws, by E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), 9. It was re-theorized on sound conceptual grounds that made it applicable to most class for- mations by William H. Sewell, Jr., “Thompson’s Theory of Working Class Formation,” in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds., E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 1990), 50–77. Second, even though the modern concept of “class” did not acquire the social meanings it signifies today before the middle decades