Modelling the Friction of Identity: A Semantic Analysis of Inquisition and Material Culture in Sixteenth-Century Venice
This study develops a semantic prosopographical framework for representing contested identity in early modern Venetian Greek networks. Under the imperative of producing FAIR historical data, the CIDOC-CRM ontological framework has become a dominant solution for re-expressing archival material in a semantically structured format. Yet its event-centric architecture remains limited in representing the performative and context-dependent nature of identity in historical documentation. This study argues that identity in early modern sources is negotiated, institutionalized, and often contested. It therefore asks: how can semantic modelling account for identity as a context-bound performance embedded in judicial and material records?
The project examines ontology use in a microhistorical reconstruction of a Greek prosopographical network in Venice, proposing a modelling strategy grounded in institutional facts and speech act theory. Rather than treating identity as static, this approach encodes it as the outcome of assertions, accusations, categorizations, and symbolic actions articulated by different actors. The strategy is tested through a microhistorical study of Greek identity in Venice between 1560 and 1600, using a curated dataset of Inquisition trials and household inventories. The implementation leverages AAAo (https://www.sari.uzh.ch/en/ordea/aaao.html), a CRMbase extension, to represent layered assertions, perspectival statements, and recursive identity claims that conventional event-based modelling does not adequately capture.
Inquisition documents map strategically deployed identities: accusations, confessions, negotiations, and condemnations all produce formally recorded identity positions. These are inherently relational and shift depending on speaker, authority, and circumstance. By contrast, domestic inventories provide insight into material agency and self-fashioning – icons, garments, books, and ritual objects that signal affiliation beyond institutional categorization. Linking these disparate archival fonds within a knowledge graph reveals structured tensions between institutional attribution and domestic practice.
The case of Manusso Marà, a Candiot physician accused of Lutheranism, illustrates this friction. His intellectual curiosity was reframed by inquisitors as “Lutheranism”. While trial records foreground suspicion and non-conformity, his inventory situates him within a learned Greek milieu, surrounded by texts and objects. Modelling both documentary strands exposes identity not as assimilation or resistance alone, but as a dynamic interplay between institutional imposition and material persistence – what this study conceptualizes as material resilience. This case illustrates how a single individual’s prosopographical profile is constructed through contradictory institutional and material attestations. To formally represent these dynamics, new ontological extensions have been developed to encode symbolic acts, expressions of intent, accusations, and condemnations as structured assertions rather than simple event descriptions. Ultimately, this framework demonstrates how FAIR-aligned semantic infrastructures can accommodate perspectivism, advancing both early modern Mediterranean identity studies and digital historical methodology.
*
Eleni Makrygiorgou is a PhD candidate at the University of Teramo, specialising in the social fabric of the intra-Greek community. Her research focuses on the intersection of microhistory and formal knowledge representation, particularly the challenges of modelling complex identities within the CIDOC-CRM framework. Her current paleography experience in cross-fonds archival research at the State Archive of Venice (ASVe) for Greek and Venetian paleography is assisting her in exploring the use of ontological extensions (AAAo) to capture institutional agency and historical speech acts.
E-mail: emakrygiorgou@unite.it
