War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice

The turn to communications in early modern studies has spawned a robust sub-field, to which we may add Anastasia Stouraiti’s impressive first book. Broadly interdisciplinary, it examines media rarely grouped together and their role in seventeenth-century Italy in disseminating wartime news, orchestrating consent for pro-war policies, and engendering patriotism across class difference.Stouraiti uses republican Venice as a focal center of communication, the metropole of a coastal empire far less pacific, she asserts, than its official iconography as Serenissima (“most Serene [State]”) suggests. She grounds her arguments on sources concerning the War of the Morea (1684–1699), an Ottoman-Venetian conflict long neglected by historians despite its revival of Venice’s colonial presence in the Mediterranean after losses, including Cyprus and Candia. She analyzes writing, visual images, material artifacts, and performance to show how diverse forms of cultural production brought home a war from distant lands, in the process inciting anti-Turkish sentiment that shaped foreign policy and metropolitan identity. The results, she argues, ranged from “strengthening in-group loyalty among the fragmenting patriciate” (p. 6) to drawing “commoners” into a “wartime euphoria” that bolstered support for the conflict and the existing social order (12–14).Stouraiti’s book is grounded on the notion of war as an event unfolding before and after as well as during armed conflict, mediated for audiences by myriad forms of communication. In the Introduction, she invokes an array of critical voices informing her larger analysis, omitting Benedict Anderson, whose Imagined Communities undergirds her discussion of the role of print in fostering “imagined Venetian community” (56) by “conveying [news] [. . .] across the social classes” (38). Habermas also merits citing in sections on the public sphere, as does Lefebvre on the disruption of everyday life in Venice by attenuated events, from crowds assembling in anticipation of news to triumphal parades unfolding in space and time.By contrast, Stouraiti presents a generous selection of primary sources to back up her claims. Chapter 1 builds on Mario Infelise on the growth and commercialization of print news in early modern Italy. The author uses war pamphlets and gazettes to document how the Morean conflict “drove rapid innovation in the market of [. . .] cheap print” (39–44) while conjuring up a “common enemy” engendering community and loyalty to the state. To show that print news reached the unlettered, she mentions public readings in wine shops and taverns, an understudied aspect of early modern “information networks.” A section on battle and victory songs performed by itinerant singers and gondoliers precedes a discussion of outdoor productions combining visual, sonic, and material media, often jointly organized by church and state. From religious processions through parishes to mock battles and fireworks in public squares, ephemeral productions were recorded in print, permitting Stouraiti to include them in her study. Here, she provocatively frames them as “rituals of information” vividly conveying news of war and “peddl[ing] the myth of a powerful imperial republic” while shoring up “the prevailing power structure of Venetian society” (67).Focusing on historiographies that helped shape metropolitan identity and public opinion about the war, chapter 2 underscores the “archival turn” of Venice’s official historians (69), who also oversaw Venice’s secret chancery. Combining factual details with patriotic rhetoric, these elites celebrated the republic’s territorial expansion while lionizing the officers who defeated “the barbarians” (81). At the same time, we learn, popular narratives called “[t]rue histories, accounts, and reports” (68) funneled redacted intelligence to a broader readership, engendering an appetite for and trust in battlefield news grounded in documentation. Samples of unredacted chancery sources would enhance the author’s discussion of censorship in this commercialization of classified news.Chapter 3 addresses the “dialectical relationship between [Venetian] colonialism and visuality” (107). Here Stouraiti argues that the market for maps, city views, fortress plans, and battle scenes transformed Morean land acquisitions into “spectatorial experience” (111) that shaped patriotism around empire-building (108). Again, adding analysis of chancery sources would nuance the discussion of censorship, given the images’ noted origins in classified visualizations of military intelligence. In a fascinating section on functionality and use, the author describes portraits of military leaders as “paper galler[ies] of war heroes” (133) exemplifying for the masses “aristocratic virtue and devotion to public duty” (139). References to advertisements for upcoming sales suggest an interesting avenue of research into the commercial side of wartime print in Venice.Stouraiti also presents Venetian prose fiction and epideictic oratory (speeches, sermons, occasional verse) inspired by the war and analyzes their effect in promoting patriotism around Islamophobia. Advancing the idea of “a powerful military state destined by God to conquer and rule the Orient” (157), these literary expressions are discussed in chapter 4, where they are juxtaposed with several anti-war texts written by and for non-elites, including a fascinating almanac prognostication (193–94). Such dissent among the “common people” (193) suggests an interesting counterpoint to the argument that the patrician class “orchestrated the production of popular consent” (blurb on the back of the book).Stouraiti draws the tightest connection with the Mediterranean in chapter 5. Here she ties materials taken from the Morea (ancient coins, sculpture, marine and botanical specimens) to Venetian triumphalist discourse justifying the ongoing conflict. She persuasively presents natural histories and archaeological reports they spawned as commercially successful print genres implicitly supporting Venice’s imperial project. A section on the bombing of the Parthenon (1687) explains how Athens became central in Venice’s late seventeenth-century imperial myth-making, despite Venetian cannon fire having destroyed its greatest classical monument.The book is a fascinating read, cogently demonstrating the endurance of Venice’s “imperial” campaign while illuminating the role of disparate media in its normalization and promotion. Limited engagement with relevant scholarship postdating her dissertation (2003) prevents the author from integrating her work into the well-established discourse on Venice’s multimedia construction of state identity and community against the backdrop of Christian-Islamic geopolitics. Nevertheless, the book comprises an important intervention, particularly in Venetian studies, critical imperial studies, and the history of news.