Last week we participated in the 58th annual meeting of the RSA in Washington DC. More than 470 panels were organized for the three day event at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and featured participants from all over the world. Five panels included contributions about Livorno; one of these was co-organized by our founding member Lisa Lillie, who presented a paper about the Old English Cemetery of Livorno. We also had the chance of attending the special presentation by the Medici Archive Project (MAP) team about their brand new open-source digital interface (BIA). Below you will find a few pictures taken at the event with the abstracts of all the presentations related to Livorno.

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Locating the Foreign in Early Modern Italy:Integrated or Alienated Minorities? I-II

Organizers: Lisa Marie Lillie (Washington University in St. Louis), Stephanie Nadalo (Northwestern University, American Academy in Rome)

Chair: Prof. Stefano Villani (University of Maryland, College Park)

Sponsor: Society of Fellows (SOF) of the American Academy in Rome (AAR)

Presentations:

Abstract:
Seventeenth-century Livorno was a bustling polyglot entrepôt, its cosmopolitan character attributable in part to the limited religious toleration and free port status granted by the Medicis. Foreigners resident in Livorno had to maintain a delicate balance between the needs of their communities and the local laws governing their activities, from religious practices to commercial transactions. My paper will analyze the Anglophone community of Livorno ca. 1640-1750, and will focus on use of the Old English Cemetery by English residents to reinforce personal and professional relationships. I will also explore the way the establishment and maintenance of the cemetery became a diplomatic bargaining chip in negotiations between English emissaries, merchants, and Tuscan authorities. Finally, I will analyze the cemetery as a locus for cross-cultural sharing. English testators adopted local Sephardic monument styles, a borrowing illustrative of the complex processes by which the English created a culturally hybrid community in a foreign land.

Abstract:

Although the Florentine Republic enjoyed a privileged diplomatic relationship with the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Mehmed II, this had changed dramatically by 1530, when the parvenue Medici Duchy was obliged to honor the Catholic alliances of their papal and Hapsburg protectors. Tuscan-Ottoman hostilities were exacerbated in 1561, when Duke Cosimo founded the Naval Order of St. Stephen with the expressed purpose of waging war against the infidels. Nonetheless, the Tuscan regime desperately sought to reestablish mercantile ties with the Ottoman Empire. Whereas Cosimo pursued Levantine trade using Sephardic Jewish middlemen, his successors sought mercantile capitulations directly from the Ottoman Sultan. This paper examines Tuscany’s efforts to renew their “true and ancient friendship” with the Ottoman Empire and demonstrates how successes and failures in mercantile diplomacy directly affected the lives of Ottoman subjects throughout the Tuscan Grand Duchy—particularly for Turkish and Armenian merchants residing within the free port of Livorno.

Early Modern Religious Dissents: Conflicts and Plurality in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (EMoDiR I)

Organizers: Federico Barbierato (Università degli Studi di Verona), Stefano Villani (University of Maryland, College Park)

Chair: Federico Barbierato (Università degli Studi di Verona)

Sponsor: RSA Annual Meeting

Presentations:

Abstract:

Between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, several Englishmen appeared in the court of the Inquisition of Pisa as sponte comparenti, that is to say, they spontaneously decided to denounce themselves as “Lutheran or Calvinist heretics.” The comparison between the trials’ minutes, the grand duke’s correspondence, and bishops’ and Jesuits’ letters seems to clarify that abjuration was the bargaining chip between Tuscan rulers and English merchants or ex-corsairs who were searching for a job in the navy of Saint Stephen’s Order. It started defining a “Tuscan cohabitation model” with the non-Catholic foreign communities, a peculiar balance between the state advantages and the protection of the Catholic orthodoxy that would allow the English community of Leghorn to grow up to become the most important British Factory of Italy.

Abstract:

Since the 1640s the British factory of Leghorn was the most important British community in Italy both for its economic and political vitality and for its ampleness. The history of the British Factory of Leghorn is also the history of the conflicts that its members had with the Tuscan authorities to assert their right to live openly their religious beliefs. One of the questions that for a long time poisoned the relationships between the English and Tuscans in those years was the attempt made by the British Factory to obtain permission to celebrate Protestant religious services for its members. The religious authorities were against any concession — not because they were afraid of a possible Protestant proselytism, but because they feared the emergence of a spontaneous doctrine of tolerance among the Catholics.

The Limits of Identity II: Trade and Community Membership in the Mediterranean

Organizers: Corey Tazzara (University of Chicago), Jeffrey Miner (Stanford University)

Chair: Francesca Trivellato (Yale University)

Sponsor: RSA Annual Meeting

Presentations: