Giorgos Plakotos
University of the Aegean

“Urban Space, Social Discipline and the Rhetoric of Crisis
in Venice, 1450-1516”

Since the mid-fifteenth century members of the Venetian elite and the Venetian administration had discursively constructed the city’s imagery and their authority in terms of crisis, in terms of a “rhetoric of peril” as historian Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan has pointed out. This discourse mainly highlighted disorder and lack of control. It reached a peak with the Venetian involvement in the Italian Wars and the dramatic defeat at the battle of Agnadello in 1509.
My paper will argue that the discourse on crisis was constantly interwoven with perceptions of the Venetian urban landscape.
Crisis was understood as a transgression of proper social and spatial order. In this view, the urban landscape of Venice became a metonymic site where the discourse on crisis and new rhetoric technologies were articulated.
At the same time, urban space became a site for repressive practices. This powerful conceptualization of crisis in terms of spatial order or disorder strongly conditioned state policies towards the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, including the persecution of “sodomy”, the control of immigration and the place of non-Catholic groups of people with the establishment of the first Jewish Ghetto as the example par excellence.