MoHu Projects

Pierre Niccolò Sofia

The project aims to study the evolution of Venetian glass and silk manufacturing sectors between the 17th and 18th centuries through the lens of trade and its impacts. In recent decades, important research work has been conducted on the world of Venetian guilds, their evolution and adaptation to international competition between the 17th and 18th centuries. In doing this, the study of internal mechanisms and power relations, production and labor organization, and technological innovation has been rightly privileged within an intense historiographical debate. The study of the commercialization of the products of these manufacturing sectors, on the other hand, remains largely unexplored, as does that of the impact that the dynamics of international trade and the circulation of manufactured goods had on the productive world. In this regard, several works in recent decades have analyzed the role of external events (such as wars, epidemics etc.) on the performance of economic activities, studying their resilience and recover capacity. Through a comparative analysis conducted on both Venetian and European quantitative and qualitative sources, the project aims to explore the resilience of the Venetian glass and silk sectors in the face of frequent disruptions in international trade or sudden changes in demand. By doing so, it will be possible to better trace the network of diffusion of the products of Venetian manufactures to international markets, understand the characteristics of these trades and their variation over time, and reconstruct the impact that global circulations had on the productive sectors of the Early modern period.

The importance of things, the vitality and mobility of objects, and their ability to offer different viewpoints on life in the past are all themes that have emerged from the many recent historical studies on material culture. This project aims to link materiality to political history, taking 19th-century Italy and its transnational networks as our field of inquiry. The focus of our analysis will be the complex and changeable lives of several objects that took on political significance in various ways and on diverse occasions, thereby contributing to the construction of political and national identities. In 19th-century Europe not only personal accessories, everyday, decorative objects and artworks, but also natural specimens played a significant role in new forms of political mobilization and dissent and in the articulation of political discourse in new repertoires and narrative forms. Whereas studies on the social life of objects and their contribution to the construction of social and gender identities have already found numerous and articulated developments, much less has been done on the materiality of the political experience and its specificities. Our research project intends to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between politics and the world of objects in the belief that this will shed light on new aspects of individual and collective political experience, at a time, in the 19th century, when the modern political sphere was being built.

The project will reconstruct and give meaning to the political lives of many objects, focusing on two different perspectives (and their ongoing relationships):

– Objects in action, variously linked to activism, political dissent, and mobility during the Risorgimento.

– Objects and the politicization of nature, particularly botanical objects created and collected by intellectuals and /or patriots.

Far from adopting a static point of view, our research will highlight mobility, re-use, cultural translations, and the transnational circulation of political objects in their different dimensions. These things embodied new practices and crisscrossed private and public spaces, political upheavals, and commercial trade routes.

Thus, this project will, on the one hand, bring out novel aspects in Italian 19th-century political practices and nationalization channels, and, on the other, make new and innovative educational and dissemination tools available to a wider public. Bringing together the work of scholars who in three Italian universities have been working on political objects for some time, the project intends to build an innovative collective workshop on the material history of politics, reflect on the methodological aspects of approaching politics through objects and finally develop an intense dissemination and public history project.

The project features two other units, one coordinated by Arianna Arisi Rota at the University of Pavia, and one coordinated by Roberto Balzani at the University of Bologna.

The objective of the Padua unit is to analyze how the staging of the nation, especially during the revolutionary episodes of the Risorgimento, also took the form of the use of a significant armoury of objects which frequently belonged to the dimension of everyday life but were re-semanticized in political and patriotic terms.

The main objective of the  WALC project is the analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective (critical-literary, geographical, sociological) of walking in urban spaces as an intangible cultural heritage of contemporary urban mobility in European cities. The social and humanistic perspective proposed by this project suggests the importance of walking as a cultural practice. The post-pandemic time, the current social changes and climatic crisis ask to rethink cities and urban mobilities, especially the transport means and ways by which we move in space, and suggest re-evaluating the role of urban walking practices.

In European cities, walking in urban space is an often neglected but widely accessible everyday activity: allowing one to reflect on the conformation of the city, perceive and embody the map of the city, and identify new routes for experiencing and exploring everyday environments. Far from being a mere self-reflecting, individual practice, walking represents a common tool for empowering citizens, allowing them to understand the value of urban narratives traced by walking paths as intangible heritage that could be enhanced by new types of open-air, mobile, and public museum activities; to re-imagine interactions between places and stakeholders; to promote dialogues between transgenerational non specialistic-audiences and academic, cultural, and institutional actors (i.e. universities, museums, local administrations and institutions).

The project features two other units, one coordinated by Filippo Milani at the University of Bologna and one coordinated by Luca Daconto the University of Milano Bicocca.

The Research Unit based at the University of Padua, coordinated by Giada Peterle, promotes an art-geography collaboration to explore walking as a mobile and creative method, and to reflect on the ways in which urban cultures can be shaped and resignified through creative and narrative practices. In particular, this Unit contributes to current research in literary geographies; literary urban studies; mobility studies; and geohumanities, and, from a methodological perspective, it works with a geocritical approach to urban mobilities and walking narratives; art-based and creative methods; mobile and auto-ethno-graphic methods.

This Research Unit is sustained by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and Humanities (MoHu) and the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua.

The WALC project collaborates also with the Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité Network of the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues – CRPM, Université Paris Nanterre

The WALC PRIN project runs the NaMUC (Narrative Mobilities of Urban Cultures) seminar series, which includes seminars hosted at the MoHu Centre, the Museum of Geography, and also on the move across multiple urban spaces

The SILKRAA project aims to reconstruct the dynamics of silk weavers’ migration between Italy and France during the early modern age. To achieve this, an interdisciplinary approach will be employed, combining socioeconomic history, migration studies, labor and gender studies, as well as the history of techniques and material culture.
Through the integration of macro-historical, micro-historical, and biographical reconstruction, SILKRAA aims to contribute to the revitalization of studies on migratory phenomena in the Early Modern period. Leveraging digital humanities, a comprehensive database will be created, gathering demographic data, biographical information, and visual/material evidence from Italian and French archives and museums.

Essential to the realization of the SILKRAA project is the training in Italian and international historical research methods at the Department of Historical, Geographical, and Ancient World Sciences (DiSSGeA) under the expert guidance of Prof. Andrea Caracausi. This training is complemented by collaborative efforts with Yale University (Prof. Paola Bertucci), the University Lumière Lyon2 (Prof. Manuela Martini), and the Como Silk Museum. Working closely with historians and experts, this collaboration is crucial for achieving the project’s objectives. The obtained results will not only significantly impact academic outcomes but also contribute to a more profound societal understanding.

Follow the project activities here:

Instagram @silkraa_msca

Twitter @silkraa

In recent years, scholars have increasingly focused on the study of economic inequality in preindustrial societies, aiming to elucidate the dynamics of social change within historical contexts. However, despite this burgeoning interest in inequality during preindustrial times, our understanding of intergenerational mobility, and, more broadly, social mobility within such settings, remains limited. Indeed, many questions remain unanswered.

Did the increase in economic inequalities characterizing the early modern period come with a rise in social rigidity?

Was Old Regime society truly as ossified as it has long been described?

This project aims to address this knowledge gap by focusing on the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, using a novel dataset constructed from Napoleonic civil status records (Stato Civile Napoleonico). Napoleonic civil status records provides a rich and comprehensive source of information encompassing a wide array of cities, towns, and rural communities within the entirety of the Kingdom of Italy, which extended across much of northern Italy and included a portion of what is now Emilia-Romagna and Marche.

This allows us to gain a broad and diverse insight into the dynamics of social mobility in both urban and rural central-northern Italy between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a crucial period in European history as this is the time when the foundations for future economic take-off are either established or neglected.

This research will be conducted through an extensive examination of the records that collect marriage publication data (Atti di pubblicazione di matrimonio). In addition to providing fundamental demographic information (age, place of residence, any previous marriages), Napoleonic marriage publications offer extensive details regarding the occupational status of both spouses and their parents. This information will enable us to explore various aspects of social mobility and occupational structure in central-northern Italy. First, we will be able to reconstruct a detailed geography of the occupational classes of the marrying individuals across different regions, examining both continuities and discontinuities in their professional pursuits. Second, we can determine the professional intersections between spouses, shedding light on relationships and dynamics in their matrimonial strategies. Lastly, this approach will allow us to investigate intergenerational mobility, i.e., whether there were significant changes in occupation between the parents’ generation and that of their children, offering a more comprehensive picture of the social and professional dynamics of the era.

Welcome to the page dedicated to “Women’s Work in Rural Italy (1500-1800)”. Our project aims to provide a better understanding of the historical dynamics surrounding gender and work between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century in rural Italy. By incorporating diverse research methodologies and exploring various geographical contexts across the peninsula, we strive to shed light on the multifaceted nature of female participation in the pre-industrial labour force.

Previous research on proto-industrialization has suggested significant labour market participation by women, particularly in textile industries and predominantly in rural areas (Mendels 1972; Ciriacono 1983). However, female participation in the pre-industrial labour force has generally been considered marginal. As a result, even the contribution of women within the family economy has been regarded as negligible. The extensive body of research related to the theory of the ‘industrious revolution’ (de Vries 1994, 2008), for example, has posited that women’s participation in the wage labour market only became widespread in the second half of the seventeenth century, and primarily in the most developed regions of Europe. But is this truly the case? What was the actual role of women within the labour market and the family economy? Was it as marginal as long assumed? Were women solely engaged in domestic activities outside the market circuit? And were these latter roles genuinely separate from market activities?

This project seeks to address these gaps by analysing specific rural areas of the Italian peninsula between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. By employing new methodologies derived from development economics research and utilizing historical sources that go beyond traditional census and registry data, our project aims to identify the actual extent of female participation in the labour market and the family economy.

Methodologically, this project draws inspiration from the verb-oriented method studies introduced by Ogilvie (2003) and later expanded upon by Ågren (2017), as well as Whittle and Hailwood (2018). At the core of this study lies a broader concept of labour than that employed in classical and neoclassical economics. Our understanding of labour encompasses all activities necessary for household subsistence and reproduction that meet the ‘third-party criterion’ (i.e., any activity that could potentially be performed by someone else in exchange for payment). This is an important premise, since in the pre-industrial era, market and non-market activities were not always clearly distinct and often intertwined temporally and spatially.

Contemporary ethnographic studies can directly interview individuals to gather information about their daily work activities. However, such data collection was not conducted during pre-industrial times. Nevertheless, we possess numerous fragments of information about the work activities carried out by men and women in their daily lives, inadvertently provided by witnesses during criminal trials. By leveraging this qualitative information and transforming it into quantitative data using an established research methodology (Carus and Ogilvie 2009), we will be able to delineate a broad range of work activities performed by women inside and outside the home, but also inside and outside the classical labour market boundaries. This approach will not only enable a more comprehensive description of the labour market structure during the pre-industrial era but also present a fairer and more complete picture of female labour participation.

The research will be conducted through the collection of new data from various regions of the Italian peninsula, each characterized by a unique economic-social environment. Each case study will contribute to the reconstruction of a vivid and comprehensive image of the labour market in pre-industrial Italy. Specifically, the project will investigate the rural areas of the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Lucca, and the Kingdom of Naples.

Sara Abram

God’s oneness and the imminence of the “Day of Reckoning” are the most dominant subjects of the first revelations that Muḥammad, the prophet of Islām, announces to the tribes of Mecca (7^th cent.). The ultimate destiny of humanity as described by the Quran and the Sunna poses today, as well as in ancient times, questions that are by no means negligible. The project aims to frame how the vivid representations of the Universal Judgement, the pleasures of Paradise, and the torments of Hell have been assimilated and interpreted by the different intellectual currents of Islamic thought (traditionalist, theological-speculative and mystical-esoteric) to better place the perspective I intend to shed light on: the philosophical one. The interpretations of the so-called falāsifa, compared to the literal readings of the Quran and to the many Islamic “narrations” on the topic, turn out to be among the highest expressions of intellectual autonomy that the history of Islamic thought has ever known. The preliminary study of falāsifa’s conception of the soul and the hereafter – together with the identification of the ancient and late antique Greek sources that they used – will led to a better contextualization of the two case studies that I intend to analyze: the hitherto unedited Book on the Knowledge of the Hereafter by the mathematician and philosopher Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfizārī (10^th-11^th cent.) and the Treatise on the Philosophical Description of the Hereafter by the Persian physician and philosopher Abū l-Faraǧ ʿAlī ibn Hindū (d. 1029/1032).

Stefano Poggi

Between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, a new conception of foreignness took root in Europe. Whereas before each individual coming from a different community was considered as a foreigner, with the rise of the administrative state foreignness became strictly related to belonging to a certain national community – and ultimately to citizenship.

This project aims to investigate this change by considering how Lombard-Venetian authorities regulated the foreigners’ mobility from the end of the Republic of Venice to the 1848 uprising. In order to do so, it will consider not only the conceptions and the legislation of the central élites but also local bureaucrats’ control practices of foreigner’s mobility.

Jinxiao Wang

Despite his profession as a military doctor for the Italian Navy, Ludovico Nicola di Giura (1868-1947) was known to the world as sinologist, translator, writer and traveller. This four-year research takes a global microhistory perspective to compile a biography for the figure based on his published works, manuscripts, private collection and first-hand archival sources from Italy and China. Featured with L. N. di Giura’s geographical mobility, social integration, and contribution to Sino-Italian cultural exchange, this research advances on three dimensions: 1) L. N. di Giura’s life-in-mobile, namely Medical education and travelling with the Italian Navy (1868-1900), Life in China (1900-1931) and Prefect and Mayor of Chiaromonte (1931-1947); 2) his integration into the contemporary Chinese upper class, including the various forces that guided the fate of the country and the local intellectuals; 3) his re-discovery of Chinese civilization despite being an initially ambitious “Civilizing missionary”, as well as his efforts on introducing Chinese culture and community to the Italian public with his commentaries, translation and literary creation. The study will not only bring to light a figure buried in history, but will offer a microscopic view into the history about Italy and China at the turn of the 20th century, which indeed represents a starting point for the discovery of absolute novelties in this context.