Book contents
- War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice
- War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 War, Information, and Popular Consent in Seventeenth-Century Venice
- 2 Making History
- 3 Printed Images and the Visual Culture of the News
- 4 Documentary Poetics and the Literary Public Sphere
- 5 Reclaiming Ancient Greece
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2023
- War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice
- War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 War, Information, and Popular Consent in Seventeenth-Century Venice
- 2 Making History
- 3 Printed Images and the Visual Culture of the News
- 4 Documentary Poetics and the Literary Public Sphere
- 5 Reclaiming Ancient Greece
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The generative power of war and its centrality to the production of culture lie at the heart of this book. Despite the common perception that these two spheres of human activity are polar opposites, in reality they have always been linked by a shared history. In the opening chapter of his Istoria, Pietro Garzoni cited Lucian of Samosata to argue that ‘war is the mother of histories’. In his celebrated treatise How to Write History, the Roman satirist recalled Heraclitus’s dictum that war ‘is the father of all things’ to mock the proliferation of contemporary war historians and stress the links between warfare and pathological history writing.1 What lies beneath this bellicose conception of historiography is the wider idea that human civilisation is inseparable from war and organised violence. In many ways, the same notion seems to be present in Walter Benjamin’s provocative thesis that ‘there is no document of civilisation that is not a document of barbarism’.
- Type
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- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023