Public life in Renaissance Mantua: Ritual and power in the age of the Gonzaga, 1444-1540

"Public Life in Renaissance Mantua: Ritual and Power in the Age of the Gonzaga, 1444--1540," examines the interaction of the Gonzaga lords with their subjects as mediated by various public events. Based primarily on the correspondence of the Gonzaga and their officials as well as statutes and decrees from the Archivio Gonzaga in the Archivio di Stato di Mantova, my dissertation seeks to determine the extent to which the Gonzaga attempted to manipulate various civic rituals in an effort to control the people of Mantua and how these subjects responded.;In their efforts to dominate through ritual, the Gonzaga principally focused on impressing those people deemed most essential to the continued maintenance of their power, that is their own nobles and visiting dignitaries of important foreign states. The Gonzaga did utilize ritual in relation to their other subjects as well. Evidence demonstrates that Mantua's rulers attempted to insert themselves into the city's traditional celebrations as a way of communicating their messages of power, but their participation in these cases appears to have been inconsistent and frequently unenthusiastic. Similarly, evidence suggests that the Gonzaga had difficulty creating interest in ritual enactments among the populace. On the rare occasions when ritual performances resulted in popular disturbances, the outburst of violence was only on one occasion clearly directed against the Gonzaga. The prevailing popular apathetic attitude to civic ritual life may well be interpreted as a form of popular resistance, but the Mantuan example does not sustain the currently popular argument that ritual enactment constituted a key site for conflict between Renaissance ruler and people.;Further, "Public Life in Renaissance Mantua" also permits us to view the political and social structures of the Gonaga signoria . My work follows the broader lines of investigation into the "modernity" of the early-modern state established by Giorgio Chittolini, Trevor Dean, and David Chambers. The evidence from Mantua suggests that the Gonzaga signoria resembled, quite generally, other northern Italian city-states such as Milan and Ferrara Mantua under the Gonzaga had begun developing the hallmarks of the modern state, bureaucracy and centralization, but the rituals of the Gonzaga court reveal that government was still a collaborative effort between the ruling family and the nobility of the mantovano .