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  • Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History
  • Stanley Chojnacki
Satya Datta . Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003. xvi + 256 pp. index. illus. bibl. $79.95 (cl). ISBN: 0–7546–3347–0.

This unusual book pursues two objectives: "to reassess the overwhelmingly positivist-traditionalist tradition of Venetian historiography," and to interpret "just how the multiple experiences of common Venetians (both men and women) in the early modern period were shaped and articulated" (1–2). The first aim is fueled by a strong theoretical impulse and an equally pronounced disdain for the "hegemonic practice of the academic historian's narrative discourse in fact-producing security" (18). The second springs from the author's view that "mainstream historical research on the Republic of Venice has largely avoided focusing on the life experiences of ordinary women and men," a "lack of interest [that] is surely also a sign of ideological commitment" (22). Satya Datta's book grossly misrepresents scholarship on Venice but in the end offers an account of Venetian society based on the work of those same "smug knower[s] of 'what actually happened'" (18) whose writing he attacks.

The book is organized into a first theoretical chapter and four others devoted to particular social categories. Chapter 1 proposes to redress "the complete lack of any critical discussion of [the] epistemological foundations" of Venetian histo-riography (1). After a lengthy review of recent debates on historical knowledge, Datta announces as his intention to "produce a coherent narrative . . . combined with a viable interpretation" employing a "transdisciplinary perspective" (20) — i.e., the approach most historians employ. The substantive chapters take up in turn the political involvement of Venetian artisans, their place in artistic production, protofeminist women writers, and female lacemakers. In each case the treatment is studded with glaring misrepresentations of historical writing. Chapter 2, for example, takes up what Datta unaccountably sees as "the seriously neglected issue of ruler-ruled relations" (37). According to him, all previous accounts of Venice's regime are flawed: Robert Finlay creates "confusion" (38); Robert Davis is also confused — though there is "no reason to doubt the sincere intention behind this apparent naivety" (44). But not all scholarly intentions are sincere. Like other historians with "conservative [sic] views," Giorgio Cracco "deliberately" misinterprets the nature of patrician authority (70); uncertainty about Brian Pullan's "actual motive" occasions doubts about his interpretations (72, n. 65); and "we have our suspicions" about Frederic Lane's choices of emphasis (73). Datta's mischaracterizations range from the individually ludicrous (Dennis Romano's "self-styled radicalism" [76, n. 73], Patricia Labalme's "arrogance" [157]) to the sweepingly fatuous ("the issue of gender remains non-existent" in studies of Venetian working women [184]).

Datta dismisses without explanation. In one study he finds "a great deal of inaccuracy in note references as well as in the main text regarding factual information" (80, n. 77); he offers no examples. Of the author of another, he cautions: "I am not fully in agreement with his mode of analysis or the conclusions drawn" (84, n. 91); no explanation. He criticizes Luca Molà for ignoring female silkworkers' [End Page 178] "transgressive experiences" of which, Datta claims "there are sufficiently indicative signs"; he indicates no such signs. After declaring that the study of asylums for women lacks a feminist dimension (53), he imputes "pseudo-feminist jargon" to one scholar of these institutions (197). Yet these and the many other works that Datta faults provide his evidence and in most cases anticipate his conclusions. Thus, "for my own interpretational purpose . . . I have drawn on information from" Susan Connell's 1976 Warburg Institute dissertation, even though it "avoids any kind of analytical/critical discussion" (110).

Datta relies on works he finds deficient because of his own uncertain research. Although he has read widely in the historical and art historical literature and in printed sources, he ignores important scholarship central to his subjects, such as that of Joanne Ferraro and of Daniela Hacke on popolano marriage conflicts, of Virginia Cox on the major female writers, of Monica Chojnacka on working-class women, of Dennis Romano on servants, and of Robert Davis...

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