This chapter focuses on ‘secret’ knowledge, that is, privileged knowledge or confidential information on political, military, economic, social, and even cultural matters that were of geostrategic significance for the Venetian state and thus ought to be protected and concealed. In fact, secrecy, that is, official state secrecy, had a pervasive aura engulfing the Venetian government’s state security pursuits. For this reason, the Council of Ten institutionalised it, issuing several formal decrees on the necessity and accomplishment of secrecy for the benefit of effective knowledge transfer. Sixteenth-century Venice was renowned for its obsession with secrecy. Cryptography, that is, the art of writing in cipher, provided the basis for written communication between the Council of Ten and their formal representatives within and beyond the territories of the Venetian dominion. In the early modern era there were different channels of knowledge exchange and transfer; secrecy was only one of them. -- Provided by publisher.
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Iordanou, Ioanna
Oxford Brookes Business School
Year of publication: 2022Date of RADAR deposit: 2022-09-28
"This is an accepted manuscript of a book chapter published in Regulating knowledge in an entangled world / edited by Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, published in 2022 by Routledge and available online: https://www.routledge.com/Regulating-Knowledge-in-an-Entangled-World/Dijksterhuis/p/book/9780367233242."