Biography

Lana Martysheva is a historian specialized in sixteenth-century political cultures and transnational information practices, with a focus on France and Italy. After obtaining a PhD in Early Modern History from the University of Sorbonne, she has been a Max Weber fellow and a scientific member of the Ecole française de Rome. Her monograph on the pacification process at the end of the French Wars of Religion was published in 2023 under the title Henri IV roi. Le pari de l’Hérétique. Her recent publications tackle the uses of news in accordance with political and religious agendas. Her current research looks at the Roman court as a global information hub and unveils the multiple spheres of action and agency of its ‘minor’ actors, linked to their social, political and writing ambitions.

Project Summary

The project is devoted to an unpublished compilation of sixteenth-century anecdotes written by Camillo Capilupi (1531-1604), secret chamberlain to three popes and then apostolic prothonotary. These stories, assembled in three manuscripts, combine politics, morality and amusement. They represent an exceptional account of the papal court, both in terms of the author’s access to information and the intimate nature of his writing. They also offer an invaluable record of European events at the time, as seen from Rome. The author’s project was precisely to make the most of his intimate knowledge of the mechanisms of power and people, and to put down in writing facts that could not be found elsewhere. In this project, the first objective is to introduce this unknown source into the historiography of the Italian Renaissance. The second objective is to analyze the corpus from the angle of the plural construction of knowledge, in particular, the relationship and complementarity between oral and written cultures. This study will shed new light both on the global informal circulation of information and on the socio-political and cultural dynamics of the court. The project thus lies at the convergence of social, political and cultural history, the history of literary practices and the history of information. It is part of a historiographical movement that is interested in plural figures, cultural brokers, intermediary agents, actors who participate in the global dynamics of power and the circulation of information without being in the limelight.