CHR Book Launch, "Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy" by Amanda Madden
in conversation with Jessica Otis
Friday, November 21, 2025 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EST
Horizon Hall 6325 and zoom
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About the book:
Civil Blood is a study of the practice of vendetta among the civic elites in sixteenth-century Italy and illustrates the complex and integral role that vendetta violence played in civic life and state formation on the winding path to state centralization. At many temporal, geographic, and political points in early modern Italy, vendetta appears to have not only disrupted but also constituted the processes by which the modern state emerged.
Amanda G. Madden examines vendetta as both central to politics and as an engine of change and illustrates the degree to which key phenomena of the period—state centralization, growing bureaucracies, institutional reforms, and the process of state formation—were interpenetrated by, and not simply opposed to, ongoing factional violence among civic elites.
Madden further illuminates in Civil Blood how elites utilized violent enmities to maintain a grip on political control and negotiated with the duke concerning political power and civic prerogatives. As a result, ruling elites not only defined their own place in governance but also shaped the function and definition of government.
About the author:
Amanda Madden is Assistant Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Her research areas include Renaissance and early modern Italy, digital history, spatial history, the history of crime and violence, the history of women and gender, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her book, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy examines the intersections between factional violence, civic politics, and early modern state formation. Current digital projects include the collaborative spatial history project, Modeling and Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, 1500-1700, and The La Sfera Project which has been funded by the NEH. Her next book project is a spatial history of gender and crime in early modern Italy examining iterative changes in crime and policing, space, and gender; changes which reconfigured the early modern state.
She is a former Marion L Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in digital pedagogy at Georgia Institute of Technology, Research Scientist for the Center for 21st Century Universities, and lecturer for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She received her PhD from Emory University in 2011 and her MA in Medieval Studies from The Medieval Institute at Western University in 2005.
In the Fall of 2024 she was a visiting scholar at the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she worked on the Delmas Foundation-funded project, "Mapping Urban Violence in Venice and the Terraferma, 1500-1700." She will be a faculty fellow at the Center for Humanities Research, GMU, in Fall of 2025 to work on her next book.
About the moderator:
Jessica Otis is an Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She received her MS in Mathematics and PhD in History from the University of Virginia, and spent four years in the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries as a CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Fellow and Digital Humanities Specialist before coming to GMU. Her research focuses on the cultural history of mathematics, plague, and cryptography in early modern England, and she has particular methodological expertise in network analysis. She has a deep interest in how to make digital humanities projects more accessible and long-term sustainable. In her spare time, she renovates houses and spoils cats.
