ABSTRACT
Honour and shame lie at the heart of Mediterranean value systems.1 The individual's position in society depends upon reputation, which in turn depends upon the extent to which they are perceived by those around them to conform to a complex of social ideals. This essay considers the criteria according to which honour could be established or undermined in early modern Venice by investigating the use of calumny, the deliberate attempt through the use of language to blacken someone's reputation in order to gain personal advantage. Venice would appear to have been an ideal setting for such behaviour. Special letter boxes in the form of a lion's mouth were placed at key points in the city as repositories for anonymous letters identifying people as heretics, blasphemers or enemies of the state. We know from the records of the Venetian Council of Ten that these denunciations were followed up with great care, even if most of them were proved to be exaggerations of unusual behaviour, or to be the product of local disputes and enmities.2 Early modern Venice was an authoritarian state, but it proved to have been far more flexible and understanding than Romantic novelists of the nineteenth century or even English dramatists of the seventeenth century would have us believe.3
