Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance - Hardcover

Muir PhD, Professor Edward

3.88

78 ratings by Goodreads

9780801844461: Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801844460 ISBN 13: 9780801844461

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993

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Awarded the 1993 Howard Marraro Prize for the best book in Italian history

Nobles were slaughtered and their castles looted or destroyed, bodies were dismembered and corpses fed to animals -- the Udine carnival massacre of 1511 was the most extensive and damaging popular revolt in Renaissance Italy (and the basis for the story of Romeo and Juliet). Mad Blood Stirring is a gripping account and analysis of this event, as well as the social structures and historical conflicts preceding it and the subtle shifts in the mentality of revenge it introduced.

This new reader's edition offers students and general readers an abridged version of this classic work which shifts the focus from specialized scholarly analysis to the book's main theme: the role of vendetta in city and family politics. Uncovering the many connections between the carnival motifs, hunting practices, and vendetta rituals, Muir finds that the Udine massacre occurred because, at that point in Renaissance history, violent revenge and allegiance to factions provided the best alternative to failed political institutions. But the carnival massacre also marked a crossroads: the old mentality of vendetta was soon supplanted by the emerging sense that the direct expression of anger should be suppressed -- to be replaced by duels.

From reviews of the complete edition:

"A model study of how vendetta and political disorder related to one another... Superbly documented." -- Times Literary Supplement

"A superbly researched book... The human detail is both vivid and coherent." -- Italian Studies

"Muir is one of the best microhistorians of our day... His careful analysis, persuasive reasoning, impressive documentation, and lively prose demand close and careful attention. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in early modern Italy, and more widely, for those who study social or microhistory." -- Sixteenth-Century Journal

"An exceptional book accessible both to students and to general readers." -- History

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Review:

On a winter morning in 1511, the first day of Carnival, a thousand militiamen entered the northern Italian city of Udine. Weary after a long campaign of battling German raiders, the soldiers began to drink--and then to brawl, and eventually to loot and burn the palaces of the wealthy. The peasants of the surrounding countryside joined in, and before long some 50 noblemen had been murdered, setting in chain a wave of reprisals through the Mediterranean blood-avenging system called vendetta. In this vigorously told reconstruction of those events, Edward Muir shows the powerful possibilities of the mentalit�s school of history, in which the attitudes and beliefs of historical actors are given as much due as other social and economic forces. While admitting that the events in Udine were a sideshow in a much larger struggle between the peasantry and the nobility in early modern Europe, Muir throws them into sharp relief; what was important to the actors in that drama was not the big picture of contemporary affairs but a specific code of manners in which manhood was declared violently. For them, "death was neither accidental nor natural but was the result of a fight between phantom forces composed of the shades of the dead who enacted revenge among humans by employing living agents." Those agents visited northern Italy with a vengeance, and anyone interested in Renaissance history will want to read Muir's account of their actions. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Edward Muir is the Ver Steeg Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is the editor, with Guido Ruggiero, of Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective and Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe.

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