Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (review)

254 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) autopsy of Clare of Montefalco presented in the hearing to consider her canonisation in 1318 to 1319. Her body was literally the site in which fourteenthcentury understandings of procreation were considered. Other essays are less well focused. Paul M. Rieder’s ‘Insecure Borders: Symbols of Clerical Privilege and Gender Ambiguity in the Liturgy of Churching’ relies on evidence on churching collected across Europe over several centuries and is consequently less coherent and persuasive. I would add, too, that Helmut Puff’s ‘The Sodomite’s Clothes: Gift-Giving and Sexual Excess in Early Modern Germany and Switzerland’ seems out of place in this anthology, as the only piece which focusses on male, same-sex relationships. Some works in the collection are well argued, but are perhaps insufficiently illustrated. There are thirty four black and white illustrations in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, but this may not be enough for a work examining material culture (usually artistic and archaeological remains). Janet Huskinson’s ‘Representing Women on Roman Sarcophagi’ would certainly be made clearer if her analysis of changes in representations of women in the Roman era was better illustrated. Likewise Anne L. McClanan’s ‘“Weapons to Probe the Womb”: The Material Culture of Abortion and Contraception in the Early Byzantine Period’ is a fascinating work and one which would be more easily understood if it were better illustrated. Aside from this quibble, The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe is an excellent anthology and a great contribution to the history of sexuality. Emma Hawkes Perth, WA McKee, Sally, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xiii, 272; RRP US$37.50; ISBN 0812235622. Sally McKee is an expert on Venetian Crete whose 3-volume edition of Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, 1312-1420 (Washington, D.C., 1998) was a significant contribution to the growing body of primary sources published in the last decade which enable us to get a much better idea of daily life and society in late medieval Crete under the Venetian rule. This book rests on a much wider array of sources, above all the notarial records from the Archivio notarile, a section Reviews 255 Parergon 20.1 (2003) of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia. McKee has identified 113 known Cretan notaries, but only 57 have papers that have survived. Moreover, the papers of the extant notaries have not survived complete, so that we have only some of the papers for some of the notaries. Even so, the extent of the sources is not the only problem. As McKee points out herself, ‘the unfortunate scholarly tendency to use the data from the protocols of one notary to generalize about economic and social trends not surprisingly has led in many cases to unwarranted conclusions that a survey of the entire corpus of notarial records would not support’ (p. ix). In addition, McKee has used the governmental sources, above all from the Archivio di Duca di Candia, another section of the Venetian Archives. Also used were published primary sources, including the deliberations of the Venetian governing bodies, such as the Senate. Altogether, the book rests on a solid basis of extant primary sources. In her Introduction, McKee tries to place Venetian Crete in a typology of colonisation that includes Spanish Mexico and English-ruled Ireland. She argues that Crete was the only Venetian possession that was ruled as an outright colony, in a sense thatVenice sent its officials, from the Duke down, to have a stint of a couple of years of governing the island in the most direct manner possible. She then tries to make the case for Crete being a forerunner of the Spanish rule over Mexico (among other American colonies) and the English dominion over Ireland. She observes, quite rightly, that Venice ruled Crete longer (1211-1669) than Spain did Mexico (1521-1821) or the British India (1757-1947).Yet, as she points out herself, in both cases the colonisers left a much deeper imprint on the conquered people: Spanish is the language and Catholicism is...