Maartje van Gelder

I am currently working on a book project, provisionally titled Uncovering Protest. It examines how early modern power and record-keeping were intertwined by analysing popular protest and archival suppression in Venice.

Long celebrated as La Serenissima, supposedly untouched by serious unrest, Venice’s reputation, I argue, rests less on social harmony than on systematic silencing in the state’s record production. Drawing on one of Europe’s largest early modern archival collections, the book focuses on what these records omit: recurring grain protests, labour conflicts, mass demonstrations in Saint Mark’s Square, and even invasions of the Ducal Palace. It shows how these protests were written out of the archive – and largely out of history.

In addition, I am working on the broader themes of the Daily Bread project, focusing on the interrelation between early modern protest and gender, power and the archive, and environmental crises and urban societies