Marginalia and mortality in early modern Venice
Marginalia and mortality in early modern Venice
复制标题
现代早期威尼斯的边缘和死亡率
DOI:
10.1111/rest.12551
复制
发表时间:
2018
影响因子:
0.2
通讯作者:
Bamji A
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Bamji A
Early modern Venice was one of Europe’s largest cities, with a population which hovered around 140,000 for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 Around 5,000 people died in the city each year. Causes of death ranged from accidents and old age to communicable diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis. The impact of disease was intensified by the density and mobility of the urban population and stimulated the hereditary patriciate which governed the city to monitor mortality closely. The city’s Health Office, the Provveditori alla Sanità, began to collect information on deaths in 1504, not long after the magistracy’s inception in 1486 following a major plague epidemic. 2 This information was inscribed into registers known as Libri dei morti or Necrologi. Systematic scrutiny of mortality was initiated by the state, rather than the Church: Venice’s earliest parish death registers date from the 1550s. 3 The Venetian Republic was a strong and organized state, its governance underpinned by a network of numerous magistracies, each of which employed clerks who generated vast quantities of paperwork. 4 The practice of death registration continued until and beyond the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. About 70% of these ‘books of the dead’survive for the years from 1537 to 1805. 5 The registers were elaborate and carefully organized volumes, which remained remarkably similar in their content, structure and format over time. In most cases, a single volume was produced each year, running from March to February in accordance with the Venetian calendar. Death registers were compiled in the offices of the city’s Health
影响因子:
0.2
作者:
Nicholas Terpstra
通讯作者:
Nicholas Terpstra
影响因子:
8.6
作者:
C. Witcombe
通讯作者:
C. Witcombe