Seminar Questions

• How did Italian governments communicate with their people before the advent of print?
• Did print technology allow them to govern in new ways?

Essential Reading

• Alexandra Bamji, "Health Passes, Print, and Public Health in Early Modern Europe", Social History of Medicine, 32/3 (2019): 441-64.
• Rachel Midura, "Policing in Print: Social Control in Spanish & Borromean Milan, 1535-1584", in Print and Power in Early Modern Europe (2020)
• Stephen Milner, "'Fanno bandire, notificare, et expressamente comandare': Town Criers and the Information Economy of Renaissance Florence", I Tatti Studies 16/1 (2013): 107-51.
• Decree concerning prostitutes and pimps (Bologna, 1586?)
• Law decreed by the Council of Ten (Venice, 1569)

Further Reading

• Flavia Bruni, "In the Name of God: Governance, Public Order and Theocracy in the Broadsheets of the Stamperia Camerale of Rome", in A. Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets: Single-sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print (Brill, 2017), 139-61.
• P. Bellettini, R. Campioni, et al., (eds) Una città in piazza. Comunicazione e vita quotidiana a Bologna tra cinque e seicento (Bologna, 2000).
• Filippo De Vivo, "Heart of the State, Site of Tension: The Archival Turn Viewed from Venice, c. 1400-1700", Annales HSS 68.3 (2013)
• Filippo De Vivo, "Ordering the Archive in Early Modern Venice (1400-1650)," Archival Science 10, no. 3 (2010): 231-48.
• Giacomo Giudici, "A Laboratory of Early Modern Written Culture: Crisis, Community, and the Written Word in Plagued Milan (1576-1578)" (Draft paper, 2020)
• Claire Judde de Larivière, "Voicing Popular Politics: The Town Crier of Murano in the Sixteenth century", in Stefano dall'Aglio et al (eds), Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London, 2016)

Web Resources

• ARCHives Project - publications of the research project on archive practices in early modern Europe
• A pre-paid printed letter sheet (Venice, 1621) - from the Folger Library.
• Tracking the Plague through Bills of Mortality - a talk from the Print curator at the Newberry Library