Un secrétaire vénitien entre archives et livres imprimés : Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557)

Un secrétaire vénitien entre archives et livres imprimés : Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557)

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Though the Venetian secretaries’ anonymity does not make it easy to gauge their political influence, historiography suggests that they played a significant role in the decision-making process of the early modern Venetian Republic.It has been proven that institutional mechanisms gave them some autonomy; it appears difficult, however, to find examples in the archives of read more a Venetian secretary’s undue appropriation of power.This article focuses on Giovanni Battista Ramusio – who worked for the Serenissima institutions from 1505 to 1557 – and aims at following step by step the trajectory of one of these actors through a precise identification of his means of action and the room for manoeuvre available to him.Though no remarkable event characterizes his career, information from the state archives, his personal correspondence, as well as the paratexts of printed books that refer to him, shed light on the public visibility of a secretary such as Ramusio in the first half of the sixteenth century.His continuous activity – which took place in part beyond his strictly professional duties – allowed him animed blue lotion topical spray to contribute to the political and cultural life of the Venetian Republic by way of his own skills and fields of expertise, in a period whose practices and prerogatives were not yet fixed by either experience or by the regulating institution of the Chancery, the Council of Ten.