Identite, mariage, mobilite sociale: citoyennes et citoyens a Venise au XVIe siecle. (Reviews).

Anna Bellavitis. Identite, mariage, mobilite sociale: citoyennes et citoyens a Venise au XVIe siec1e

(Collection de 1'Ecole Francaise de Rome, 282.) Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 2001. 419 pp. ISBN: 2-7283-0576-5.

Ever since the publication of Brian Pullan's study of the scuole grandi, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (1971), the subordinate category of Venetian elites known as the cittadini has drawn a great deal of interest, more in many respects than the nobles who monopolized political offices and ruled the city. Much of the scholarly effort has focused on ferreting out the technical and legal meanings of citizen status and plotting the careers of that sub-category of men within the citizen ranks who enjoyed the exclusive right to certain positions in the Venetian chancery. Following a lead provided by Gasparo Contarini in his treatise De magistrati bus et republica Venetorum, historians have attributed Venice's much vaunted political and social stability at least in part to the honors and rewards offered to this subaltern bureaucratic elite. In the study under review here, Anna Bellavitis challenges an overly legalistic conception of cittadinanza and goes instead in search of citizen identity. The result is an intriguing but at times idiosyncratic work, filled not only with fascinating insights but also some frustrating lacunae.

The book is divided into three parts: the first examines the legal definitions and prerogatives of citizenship; the second cittadino marriages and the place of women; the third marital alliances, social mobility, and family memory. Ironically, it is Bellavitis' discussion of the legislation governing citizen status which proves most satisfying and informative. Unlike her predecessors who have read the laws from a strictly civic viewpoint and in conjunction with evolving notions of nobility, Bellavitis regards the evolution of citizenship and its privileges from the much broader perspectives of the developing territorial state, foreign policy, and transformations within the economy. For example, she interprets new fifteenth-century laws regarding recruitment into the chancery as a response to the influx of educated Greeks into the city following the fall of Constantinople (72), and efforts in the sixteenth century to tighten the eligibility for certain offices as part of a deliberate policy of fragmentation ra ther than integration following the war of the League of Cambrai (78). Similarly, she sees debates concerning the distribution of offices within the scuole grandi not as a conflict between patricians and cittadini but between cittadini and foreigners (106). She argues that by the end of the sixteenth century, citizenship had evolved from a legal status into a social identity, composed of those practicing honorable professions, traceable in the shifting status of those professions themselves.

But this same broad and highly informative perspective is less evident in the second and third sections. Here Bellavitis concentrates on family practice, and the reader is treated to a mass of information regarding marital alliances, dowries, inheritance patterns, and social mobility, including several extended case studies of individual families and a particular concentration on cittadino women - all marshalled to support her second major conclusion, that citizen identity was essentially familial. However, it is at times unclear what significance to assign this data, especially as there is little effort to compare citizen practices to those of the great mass of the city's residents, the popolani.

In the final chapter, on family memory; Bellavitis attaches a great deal of interpretive weight to the chronicle of the Ziliol family, arguing that the second part in particular, composed by Alessandro Ziliol in the seventeenth century, reflects a process of exclusion not integration, that it testifies to "a state of frustration rather than of privilege" (317) typical of the cittadini. For her, the composition of cittadino family chronicles was "a response to an absence of political identity" (316). However, given the importance she attaches to this work, it is difficult to understand why she does not include consideration of the other known citizen family chronicles, especially those by the Freschi and Amadi, or why James Grubb's important essay on Venetian ricordanze ["Memory and Identity: Why Venetians Didn't Keep Ricordanze," Renaissance Studies vol. 8 (1994):375-87], which reaches very similar conclusions, is absent from the bibliography.

In sum, Bellavitis has written a valuable but fragmented book, one well worth consulting for the data it offers and the challenge it provides to some long-standing assumptions about citizenship in Venice. Her major thesis, however, remains provocative but unproven. Included as appendices are the texts of various laws regarding citizenship as well as a transcription of the Ziliol family chronicle.