the anthropology of venice 507
on another occasion, he complained about “a very poor festa, and cherea
[the actor] was reproached by everybody. The one... produced last year...
was much better; i conclude that this was a very bad showing.”60 on other
occasions he complained about the obscenity in ruzante’s plays.
Venetian Cultural FiltersThe remarkable conservatism of the Sanudo’s vision of Venice can be
demonstrated through comparison with Martin da canal’s Les Estoires de
Venise, composed more than 200 years earlier. Although written in franco-
Venetian to appeal to the literary tastes and linguistic capabilities of late
13th-century readers and crammed into the literary model of a french
romance-epic, da canal’s history anticipated and perhaps helped form
Sanudo’s cultural filters.61 To da canal, Venice was about its conquests
and victories, but most of all it was about its festivities, the annual civic
processions, and the glory of the doge and his retinue. in Sanudo’s time
there were no longer jousts in the piazza, and the dogaressa’s patronage
of Venetian guildsmen was less celebrated, but the myth of Venice and
the ducal processions looked very similar.62 The comparison of Sanudo
and da canal suggests that embedded in the anthropology of patrician
Venice was the immensely popular cultural form of late medieval chivalry,
honed during the crusades, bequeathed to Venice after the conquest of
constantinople during the fourth crusade, and modified in later centu-
ries by italian republican thought and institutions.
The elite, patrician myth represented only the upper stratum of mean-
ing in Venice, but it was a decidedly thick layer and one that must be
carefully scraped away before the other strata can be excavated. The
archeology of Venetian culture has been fruitfully classified by analyses of
transgressions and crime. crime, sexual violence, magical practices, blas-
phemy, insults, and gossip all reveal a society split by antagonisms among
the elite itself and by strife among the other classes.63 Venice was not
60 Sanuto, I diarii, 32:446; 44:172. for translations of quotes, see Sanudo, Cità Excelentis-
sima, pp. 492, 510 respectively.
61 See laura K. Morreale’s introduction to the english translation of Martin da canal,
Les estoires de Venise: Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed. Alberto
limentani (florence, 1972), trans. laura K. Morreale (padua, 2009), p. viii.
62 on the dogaressa, see hurlburt, The Dogaressa of Venice.
63 guido ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (new Brunswick, n.J., 1980);
ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (oxford,
1985); ruggiero, Binding Passions; and horodowich, Language and Statecraft.