Brodie Waddell

Petitions and supplications have been flying thick and fast over the past month. Contributors to the Addressing Authority Online Symposium have spotted them asking for permission to print a broadsheet about conjoined twins in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, decrying Charles I’s religious policy in seventeenth-century Scotland, and seeking a tax exception in eighteenth-century London. On twitter, they could be found claiming that mariners had been forced into cannibalism and that their complaints were justified by the example of Queen Esther. One was even seen petitioning ‘to the Petitioners’ during the Popish Plot scare of 1680.

It would be silly to try to sum up all the brilliant contributions by both the authors and commenters over the course of the symposium. However, I will take the opportunity to try to briefly highlight three issues that came up in the papers and discussion that I hadn’t properly considered before. Continue reading →

This post in our Addressing Authority Online Symposium comes from Giacomo Giudici, who recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of the ERC funded project ‘ARCHIves – a History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy‘. Here he shows how petitions could be an engine for pre-modern governance, providing a precious source of information to the Milanese authorities.

The Sforza are the dynasty that ruled Milan and its duchy continuously from 1450 to 1499, and then, only intermittently, between 1500 and 1535.[1] Like all the rulers of the time, they relied on petitions to administer their dominion. In the Sforzesco archive, located in Milan, hundreds and hundreds of original petitions are to be found mingled with other documents in two huge collections, called Comuni (literally “Towns”) and Famiglie (“Families”), created from scratch by nineteenth-century archivists. Previous scholars have, therefore, focused their attention on these collections.[2]

Milan, c.1470

However, historians have ignored another source displaying petitions: the Registri delle missive, chancery copybooks in which the outgoing Sforza correspondence with subjects (peripheral officers, subject communities, individual subjects) was registered. The reason of this lacuna is simple. In the copybooks, the petitions are hidden in plain sight. Ducal letters originating from the receipt of a petition mention it briefly at some point, usually at the beginning – for example: “We have received a petition from the agents of the men of our land of Pizzighettone (…) we order you to (…)”.[3] It is easy to miss the tiny note, or to think that little can be done with it. Are we sure this is true, though?

Original petitions – or those reproduced in registers in their entirety – are, of course, mines of historical evidence. They lend themselves to the most diverse research perspectives: political history, social history, the history of justice, but also linguistics and, more generally, anthropology. Yet, in the case of our copybooks, we get the chance to observe petitions in a bigger picture. We can grasp how, and how heavily, petitions featured in the communication flows between the centre and the peripheries of the duchy of Milan – the character and function of such communication flows being veritable “shapers” of polities and politics, just like new social media set the tone and contents of today’s political debate.[4] In other words, even though in the Registri delle missive we lose the strict contents and wording of the petitions sent to the Sforza, we crucially gain a systemic perspective on their use. Continue reading →

Our next post for the Addressing Authority Online Symposium has been written by Laura Stewart of the University of York. She brings to our attention the important role of petitions in the mobilisation of opinion against King Charles I’s religious policies in Scotland, but also point to the problems of identifying the extent of popular participation and suggests that petitioning did not inevitably lead to a more open or ‘democratic’ mode of politics.

Scholars of early modern England have made a strong case for the significance of petitioning as one of the means by which new political associations and practices came into being. Petitions had long been seen as a legitimate political tool but, according to David Zaret, it was the combination of this practice with the move into print that mattered. Printed petitions were nothing less than the harbinger of ‘public opinion’ and, hence, modern democratic politics.

Although Zaret’s work has generated fruitful debate, his thesis has been heavily critiqued by historians. The likes of Jason Peacey, amongst others, have sited petitioning amongst a far wider range of other practices and media, not all of which aimed ‘to publicize a case in the public sphere’. For Peacey, petitions were part of a process in which a wider cross-section of society was able not only to engage more fully and deeply with parliamentary politics, but also to appropriate such practices for its own uses. The key issue here is less whether such activity furthered the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ – some of it clearly did not – than the ways in which print technology facilitated widening participation in politics.[1]

Peacey’s shift of emphasis is useful to historians of those parts of Europe in which precious few signs of the emergence of Zaret’s ‘democratic culture’ can be found prior to the eighteenth century. Scotland is one of those places. In an important book on the debates surrounding the Union of 1707, Karin Bowie argued that it was only in the closing moments of the seventeenth century that the conditions for the emergence of ‘public opinion’ finally obtained in Scotland. Petitioning generated debate throughout society and ‘set new precedents for the engagement of public opinion’.[2] This may well have been the case, but it raises questions about earlier periods.

There may not have been either ‘public opinion’ or a ‘public sphere’ before 1699, but – following Peacey – I would like to suggest that petitions offer other ways of thinking about subtle, yet important, developments in the nature of political participation during the era of the Scottish Revolution. Continue reading →

Our next post in the Addressing Authority Online Symposium comes from Joris van den Tol of Leiden University. Here he shows how networks of individuals involved in the Dutch Atlantic trade used petitions to lobby metropolitan institutions and perhaps contributed to the formation of a ‘public sphere’.

‘We all know that a monopoly is the most odious thing in the world and the most harmful practice of all’, wrote the directors of the Amsterdam chamber of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in January 1637.^[1] This is an interesting standpoint for a group at that moment enjoying the exclusive trading rights to and from the Company’s colonies in the Atlantic. So, why did the Amsterdam chamber decide to advocate giving up the WIC monopoly in the Atlantic? Who or what influenced their decision? How did individuals lobby both the Company and the highest political levels for their own interest in regard to free trade, religious freedom, authority, military assistance, or other issues? Moreover, why did these interest groups decide to lobby – as opposed to fighting the Company in court for example?

The history of the Dutch in the Atlantic in the seventeenth century used to be a story of a Company chartered in 1621 that was institutionally weaker than its competitors or its East Indian counterpart (VOC) and thus deservedly fell behind, lost large parts of its colonial possessions, and went bankrupt in 1674.^[2] However, more recent work has shown that the Dutch Atlantic was built on loosely organized personal networks rather than centralized metropolitan institutions.^[3] These networks were self-organized, often pluri-religious, multi-ethnic, and cross-cultural, but more importantly had intersecting interests.^[4] Moreover, they cooperated pro-actively to try to influence the structures, institutions, and policy that shaped their world.

There was a duality of structure between the individuals and the structure; the structures at the same time enabled and limited the actions of the agents, as well as being comprised of the actions from the agents. This process of structuration is what I call lobbying, and indicates a hermeneutic relationship between the agents and the institutions.^[5] Lobbying removes the impetus for historical actions in the Dutch Atlantic from the Company or the ‘state’ and puts it in the hands of individuals and organized interests.

Lobbying by petition

Lobbying happened in two ways: direct, with the aim of convincing the political mandataries[6]; and outside, with the aim of pressuring the political mandataries through public opinion.^[7] Direct lobbying can be studied through petitions, correspondence, presentations, journals and social capital.^[8] Outside lobbying is studied through petition drives and pamphlets.^[9] Petitions have been largely neglected in Dutch historiography – both in relation to the Atlantic and as a means of studying lobbying.^[10] A study of the mechanisms of lobbying treats all of the different sources not just as repositories of historical facts, but analyses the function that these objects had for the individuals that created them. Continue reading →

This post in our Addressing Authority Online Symposium comes from Fabio Antonini, who recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of the ERC funded project ‘ARCHIves – a History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy‘. He examines a single illuminating document from seventeenth-century Italy to show how a skilled writer could craft a powerful petition, and what this can tell us about the secretive men who controlled the flow of information in the Venetian Republic.

There were few figures more important to the legislative and diplomatic activity of the early modern Republic of Venice than the secretaries of the city’s chancery. Operating within a vast and complex bureaucratic hierarchy, these were the scribes, archival assistants and international correspondents who drove the Republic’s substantial information networks, both within the city and across the continent. From an individual perspective, however, written traces of their careers and professional activity are often hard to come by amongst the Venetian state papers; the deliberately faceless and anonymous representation of the Republic’s various councils meant that the voice of the individual secretary is far more muted than in other prominent examples across early modern Europe.[1]

One of the rare occasions in which the secretaries of the Republic were allowed a personal voice, however, was in the petitions and supplications addressed to their paymasters – the highly secretive executive body known as the Council of Ten – which now reside in the Venetian State Archives. Many of these petitions, in which the secretaries give a detailed narrative of their careers and activities in order to demonstrate their years of service to the state, were often submitted in the hope of salary increases, promotions within the ranks of the chancery, or even favourable treatment for their children as they too embarked upon the secretarial career path.

Vendramin’s petition in the Venetian State Archives, 1614

In some cases, however, the stakes were significantly higher. Whilst looking through these semi-autobiographical records as part of my research into the history of the Venetian chancery,[2] I came across a particularly poignant and revealing example of the importance of petition writing for the livelihoods of Venice’s early modern secretaries. This particular petition was submitted by a former secretary of the Senate – the third highest ranking within the hierarchy of the chancery – Giacomo Vendramin, who in 1612 had been accused of revealing state secrets whilst serving the Venetian ambassador in Florence. Vendramin was ordered back to Venice to face trial, and was subsequently sentenced to two years imprisonment.[3]

In some respects, Vendramin had got off lightly. The revelation of state secrets – whether through design or negligence – had long been an extremely serious offence for those entrusted with compiling and registering government records. In one famous case in 1542, for example, an unfortunate secretary was publically strung up between the columns of Saint Mark’s Square after having been caught in the act of selling secret papers to an Ottoman spy.[4]

Continue reading →