Ordering Customs is an intellectual and cultural history of the production and circulation of ethnographic knowledge in early modern Venice. It examines how a range of figures-diplomats, bureaucrats, printers, readers, and ordinary Venetians-produced, used, and circulated information about customs from the sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries.

Ordering Customs explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these developments. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis for defining religious and cultural difference in new ways. Taylor draws on a trove of unpublished sources—diplomatic correspondence, court records, diaries, and inventories—to show that the study of customs, rituals, and ways...

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered...

The essays in Gendering the Renaissance offer a nuanced picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture through overlapping lenses that bring into focus myriad issues, from race and religion to schooling and storytelling. Read in dialogue with one another, these interventions provide a multifaceted view of currents in gender studies and early modern Italy.