Filippo de Vivo

I am a historian of Renaissance and early modern Italy. I specialise on Venice and its extensive empire and connections across Europe and the Mediterranean, and I also have a strong interest in questions of historical method, the impact of archival construction and suppression, and microhistory. I work on power and communication, from rhetoric and speeches in government councils to pamphlets, newsletters, graffiti scribbled on walls and heated discussions in barbershops and pharmacies as well as the long-distance circulation of news across political, cultural and religious boundaries.

My research is heavily archival, but I am fascinated in archives not just as sources, but as themselves objects of history, and I have worked on the comparative history of late medieval and early modern archives in principalities, republics and imperial capitals across all of Italy, from Lombardy to Sicily. All these states tried to cope with shared problem of information overload. I am also interested in the social and cultural history of power relations, urban spaces, and human behaviour. For example, I researched walking in the sixteenth century: a seemingly universal act, in fact charged with meaning that changed over time and depended on status, profession and gender. I recently combined these two interests in an article published by Past and Present, co-written with Maartje van Gelder (Amsterdam) on the archival suppression of radical forms of protest by workers.

I am currently completing an edition of Thomas Hobbes’ translation of a large collection of newsletters written written in Venice in 1615-1628 for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Hobbes. The author, Fulgenzio Micanzio, was at the centre of a thriving transnational circle of French, English and German correspondents; he sent news ranging from central Europe to the Ottoman and Persian empires and discussed the diffusion of Francis Bacon’s works. In England, the letters’ recipient and Hobbes’ patron William Cavendish, commissioned the translation for further circulation as a means of mobilising anti-Spanish opinion.

I am one of the convenors of the Early modern Italian seminar.

For more information, please see my page on the History Faculty website.