502 edward muir
that conservatism produced allowed a level of religious and intellectual
speculation that was unusual, even dangerous in the rest of italy, espe-
cially by the late 16th and 17th centuries when the stakes for conformity to
catholic orthodoxy were higher than they were in Sanudo’s day.45 Vene-
tian civic rituals were augmented during the course of the 16th century
by the flowering of Venetian theater, the first buds of which were evident
in Sanudo’s own time. Sanudo was an ardent fan and occasional critic
of Venetian rituals and dramatic performances, accounts of which fill his
diaries.
exemplary punishments supplied a baseline for the ritual expression
of Venetian authority. in 1506, a prostitute who had murdered a black-
smith faced an especially elaborate ritual execution. The Quarantia crimi-
nale decreed that “she be transported along the grand canal on a float,
as usual, as far as Santa croce; she should disembark on Corpus Domini,
where she will be taken on a litter by land to Santa Sofia, and there [at the
scene of the crime] a hand will be cut off; then she will be taken to San
Marco, also by land, and between the two columns she will be whipped
and then decapitated; her head is to be hung up at San giorgio, and the
body is to be burned.”46 The return to the murder scene where the mur-
deress had her hand, the instrument of the crime, chopped off produced
a ritual exorcism of the defiled space and extended the authority of the
republic into the neighborhoods. government in Venice and its domin-
ions consisted primarily of the administration of justice. The procession
to Venice’s political center at the columns of Justice, which were topped
with the images of the dual patrons of the republic, St Mark and St Theo-
dore, tied together through ritualized justice the center and the periph-
ery, but as recent research has shown, executions took place all over the
city. Justice was as much defused as centralized, revealing an attempt to
make the rituals of justice fit into the localized urban spaces where crimes
took place.47 The details of these ritual punishments were not uniform
but became a matter of debate in the highest councils. The murder of a
grocer from Montenegro by his wife Bernardina was deemed especially
45 edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and
Opera (cambridge, Mass., 2007).
46 Sanuto, I diarii, 6:289. Translation mine. See Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice,
p. 247.
47 elisabeth crouzet-pavan, “la proximité en négatif: pratiques de stigmatisation et
espaces du quotidien dans l’italie de la renaissance,” paper presented at conference on
The Power of Space: Cities in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy and Northern Europe, The
italian Academy, columbia University, n.y., March 2010, publication forthcoming.