Friendship and Conversation in Seventeenth‐Century Venice

Abstract

The wars in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century, the descent of France and the Low Countries into near anarchy in the second half of the century, the collapse of the Empire in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the English Civil War in its middle decades produced a fascinating reconceptualization of political life that has, in turn, inspired a rich scholarly literature.1 New ideas about the state and sovereignty, obligation and freedom were the harvest of the unhappy upset of the traditional balance between estates and kings, regions and the center, church and crown. How did the ideal of good membership in the political community that is bound up with the word “citizen” change with the changing notion of political community? How did contemporaries themselves describe this change? That is one problem to which this article is addressed. Scholars interested in the development of public life sought as early as 1933 to search out the beginnings of the sociability that had come to seem a constitutive feature of modern times. Erich Auerbach located it in the Paris of Louis XIV; Rene Pintard saw a precursor of it in the Paris of Louis XIII, but found that it was killed off rather than encouraged by the new absolutism; and, after the Second World War, Reinhard Koselleck saw it in the Republic of Letters and Jurgen Habermas in the coffee culture of Restoration London.2 More re-