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 Taylor draws on a trove of unpublished sources—diplomatic correspondence, court records, diaries, and inventories—to show that the study of customs, rituals, and ways...