Strand
London
UK
Focusing on several court cases from areas as diverse as Nauplion, Bocca di Cattaro and Venice, this seminar will trace the movement of both individuals and communities across the Mediterranean, in order to propose a framework for thinking about what it meant to live in-between empires in the fifteenth century. Rather than privileging either the metropolitan or colonial perspective, light will be shed on precise strategies used by individuals and communities alike to engage with the Venetian state and make claims about identity, social membership and the empire. The image that emerges is one where historical agency is not always on the side of the state and its military power, but rather where individuals navigate between overlapping legal and political systems, and where international norms take shape not in the Venetian metropolis, but at the edges, passages and corridors of the Mediterranean Sea.
Milena Grabacic studied Byzantine studies, medieval history and art history at the universities of Belgrade and Oxford. Her doctoral thesis examined the intersection of religion and politics in Venice’s Stato da Mar in order to show how religious devotion was used to reinforce, negotiate and challenge colonial relations between the Venetian state and its culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse subjects. Milena was a lecturer in late medieval history at Wadham and St John’s Colleges, Oxford, and convened the Medieval Visual Culture Seminar at the University of Oxford. She is now embarking on a new project which draws on anthropological methods to study the everyday life of various groups of foreigners in fifteenth-century Venice.