Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Department of History

Term 2 Week 5: Politics and the Public Sphere

Seminar Questions

  • Did print create a political public sphere?
  • How did governments react to the spread of political information in print?
  • How and when did print begin to be used for the purposes of propaganda?

Essential Reading

  • Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007), Chapter 5.
  • Iain Fenlon, The Ceremonial City. History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 2007), chap. 9.
  • Emperor Maximilian, Letter to the Venetian People from Venice: A Documentary History (RP)
  • El modo de elezer el Serenissimo Principe di Venetia (The Way of Electing the Most Serene Prince of Venice) (Venice, 1523) (RP)
  • Paolo Sarpi, "On Slanderous Books," from Brendan Dooley (ed.), Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings (New York, 1995) (RP)

Further Reading

  • Brendan Dooley, 'The Public Sphere and the Organization of Knowledge', in Early Modern Italy: 1550-1796, ed. John A. Marino (Oxford, 2002), 209-28.
  • Filippo De Vivo, “Public Sphere or Communication Triangle? Information and Politics in Early Modern Europe”, in M. Rospocher (ed.), Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna, 2012).
  • Massimo Rospocher and Rosa Salzberg, “An Evanescent Public Sphere. Voices, Spaces, and Publics in Venice during the Italian Wars”, in M. Rospocher (ed.), Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna, 2012).
  • P. Bellettini et al. (eds), Una città in piazza. Comunicazione e vita quotidiana a Bologna tra cinque e seicento (Bologna, 2000).
  • Filippo De Vivo, “Paolo Sarpi and the uses of information in seventeenth-century Venice,” Media History 11/(1-2) (2005): 37-51.
  • Filippo De Vivo, “Pharmacies as centres of communication in early modern Venice,” Renaissance Studies 21/4 (2007): 505-521.
  • Dorit Raines, “Office Seeking, ‘broglio’, and the Pocket Political Guidebook in Cinquecento and Seicento Venice”, in Studi Veneziani, n.s., XXII, (1991): 137-194
  • Ottavia Niccoli, Rinascimento anticlericale. Infamia, propaganda e satira in Italia tra Quattro e Cinquecento(Rome, 2005).
  • Simone Testa, “Did Giovanni Maria Manelli publish the Thesoro Politico (1589)?,” Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 380-93.
  • Helen, Watanabe-O'Kelly, 'The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form', in Mulryne, R. [et al.] Europa Triumphans : court and civic festivals in early modern Europe. Vol. 1 (Aldershot, 2004), pp.3-18.
  • Brian Richardson “The Prince and its early Italian readers,” in Martin Coyle ed. Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester, 1995).
  • Bronwen Wilson, "'Il bel sesso, e l'austero senato': The Coronation of Dogaressa Morosina Morosini Grimani", Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 72-139.
  • Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599)
  • Brian Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2009), especially 153-169.
  • Adam Fox, “Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan England and Early Stuart England,”The Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 597-620.
  • Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003).
  • David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
  • Michael A. Sherman, "Political Propaganda and Renaissance Culture: French Reactions to the League of Cambrai, 1509-1510," Sixteenth Century Journal 8, no. 2 (1977): 97-128.
  • Craig E. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1987).
  • Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995).
  • D. Bellingradt, "The Early Modern City as a Resonating Box: Media, Public Opinion, and the Urban Space of the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne, and Hamburg ca. 1700", Journal of Early Modern History, 16:3 (2012): 201-240.
  • J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013).

Web Resources