CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Kuncevic, Lovro |
|---|---|
| Title | The Myth of Ragusa: Discourses on Civic Identity in an Adriatic City-State (1350-1600) |
| Summary | In my thesis I tried to analyse the self-representation of Ragusa during the period of some three hundred years, from the fourteenth until the early seventeenth century. In other words, I was interested in various ways in which Ragusans spoke about themselves as a community, various images which they created of their city-state. Since Ragusan self-representation happened through very different social practices, ranging from historiography to civic ritual or visual arts, I had to take into account quite diverse source material (such as diplomatic correspondence, poetry, historiography, descriptions of ritual or representative art). I have approached the statements regarding the collective identity found in these sources through a set of contextualizing questions. Most important among them were: who were the authors of a given identity statement; in which historical circumstances was it made; and, finally, what was the purpose for which this statement served. It seems to me that various Renaissance utterances regarding Ragusa can be classified into three major discourses of identity. When I say “discourse of identity” I refer to the traditionally established modes of speaking about Ragusa; ways of describing the city-state which were characterized by one central theme and the specific group of common-places (topoi). The three main discourses of identity typical of Renaissance Ragusa were: the discourse of origin, the discourse of statehood, and the discourse of frontier. In other words, in the vast majority of the cases when Ragusans spoke about their city-state they did one of the following. They either thematized its origin and formative first centuries, they reflected on its political independence and republican constitution, or they described its perilous position and specific missions on the frontier with Orthodoxy and Islam. Such a threefold division of identity discourses provides the organizational principle of my study: each of its three chapters is dedicated to one of the major discourses, following its history in a roughly chronological order. |
| Supervisor | Jaritz, Gerhard |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/mphkul01.pdf |
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