The Creaton of Civic Identity in 16th-Century Venice

FAIN: HR-50294-06

Elizabeth Anne Horodowich
New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM 88003-8002)

This proposal is to fund one year of salary replacement to support the completion of a book about the development of the state in early modern Europe. My book argues that a crucial but unrecognized component of statebuilding was the management of public speech and foul language. While scholars have long studied the history of language, they have done so largely by considering literary, printed texts. My study, by contrast, employs sociolinguistic concepts to examine the actual words of everyday people in the archival documents of renaissance Venice. I demonstrate that early modern states formed not only by building armies and bureaucracies, but also by imposing a normative language on their citizens and immigrants.

Associated Products

Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Book)
Title: Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice
Author: Elizabeth Horodowich
Abstract: While historians typically describe the state as emerging through a wide variety of processes and structures such as armies, bureaucracies, and administrative organizations, this book demonstrates that a crucial but unrecognized component of statebuilding in Renaissance Venice was the management of public speech: controlling foul language. Ideas about language were deeply embedded in Venetian political culture. Instead of studying the history of language through literary, printed texts, Horodowich examines the speech of everyday people on the streets of Renaissance Venice by looking at their actual words as recorded in archival documents. By weaving together a variety of historical sources, including literature, statutes, laws, chronicles, trial testimony, and punitive sentences, Horodowich shows that the Venetian state constructed a normative language – a language based not only on grammatical correctness, but on standards of politeness, civility, and piety – to protect and reinforce its civic identity.
Year: 2008
Primary URL: http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1175597/?site_locale=en_GB
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780521894968

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