Preliminary Programme

Large cities promised many opportunities to immigrants in the early modern period - the possibility of many different types of work, of food in a crisis, of an education, of a chance for economic or social advancement, of more freedom, of fun, and of a fresh start in life. This paper considers the city of Venice as a place for reinventing oneself in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on a number of Jewish converts to Christianity who sought to establish a new life for themselves in the Venetian metropolis, and were subsequently investigated by the Inquisition. Work was an important consideration for such neophytes. Access to work was one of the reasons why poor Jews converted to Christianity, and access to work was also central to the success of such conversions. As a result, neophytes who sought to practise skilled crafts in Venice, not only had to shed their previous religious identities and reinvent themselves as Christians, but they also had to adopt new working personae. This is because, in Venice, the livelihoods of these converts were dependent upon their acceptance by established craft organisations with strong corporate identities of their own. Cross-referencing testimony presented to the Holy Office, with Venetian trades' records, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: How did one go about refashioning an identity as a Christian worker in early modern Venice? Was this straightforward? And could it be easily sustained? (Show less)

On entering a convent Catholic women underwent a deep change of their social status. The monastic profession was a rite of passage that signalled: 1. the acquisition of a new identity (expressed by the new “religious” name); 2. the radical change of their patrimonial rights (through the obligation to embrace religious poverty which deprived them of any property rights); 3. the definitive loss of physical freedom (as ecclesiastical legislation approved by the Council of Trent in 1563 imposed strict enclosure on nuns and permanently prohibited them to exit the convent, or to let outsiders in) as well as the determination to preserve their virginity intact for their celestial spouse. For those women who entered the convent coming from situations of family disorder, such as women from broken marriages for instance, there was a further – informal - requirement: their willingness to break with their past life. Drawing on a case study from 17th century Mantua, and using convent records, my paper explores the issue of identity change and the constraints faced by women in order to reshape their identity and make it suitable for a new religious life. (Show less)

Whatever identity is, bureaucratically, it's something that creates a double of a person in writ. In its modern form as a compulsary written document of a person's 'identity', the passport is a Renaissance invention. How were, then, passports, made to function five centuries ago? How were people described and registed in order to be identified by others who had never seen them before, in the centuries before photography and before the fingerprint, in the world without centralized administrations, where people's names and adresses were fluid and changing quickly?

The paper explores the making and the different uses of passports, including the non-intended ones, from their earlier forms as sealed letters of recommandation and safe-conducts in the Middle Ages to the rise of compulsary and standardized "passaporti" or "passborten" from the later 15th to the early 17th century, focussing on French, Swiss and Italian sources. Seen from a historical perspective, identity documents are not certifications of a person's fixed state, and never were. Rather, they are attestations - and products - of the transformation of a person. And this is what links the history of Renaissance scribes, journeymen, mercenaries, and gypsies with that of the papers we carry in our pockets to prove who we are. (Show less)