Venetian Historiography and Public Credit 1200–1600

VenHisCred is the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the emergence of public credit as a subject for Venetian civic historiography.

Examining the nexus between public credit, state formation, and historiography from the 13th to the 16th century, it asks why Venetian chroniclers started to include descriptions of public credit in narratives of the political past and investigates how they represented the relationship between state borrowing and state formation.

Undertaken at the Department of Economic and Social History (WISO), University of Vienna (UNIVIE) with a training secondment at Harvard University, the project develops an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining digital corpus linguistics with close contextual reading to analyse the emergence of new discursive topics in large bodies of texts.

In Venice, public credit was fundamental in raising emergency money for military expenditure.

Whilst forcedand voluntary loans and annuities funded state expansion, these credit instruments also enabled families to preserve wealth, ascend socially, and mobilize capital for welfare. However, we know little about Venetians’ own subjective understanding of the role of credit in political life.

VenHisCred uncovers these ideas through Venice's vast corpus of chronicles.

The project develops an innovative new methodology that uses digital text analysis and close reading to analyse this large corpus of texts.

VenHisCred will make available a new digital corpus, a database of 2200 citizen creditors from newly discovered statistics, and result in a peer reviewed journal article on narrating public credit in medieval and early modern Venice.