Contracts, Surveillance, and Censure of State Power in Arienti’s "Triunfo da Camarino" novella (Le porretane 1.1)

This essay argues that the first novella of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Porretane asserts the individual’s right to privacy and underscores the importance of contractual obligations regardless of social status. It offers, moreover, a thinly veiled critique of the military adventurism and rhetorical manipulation of those wielding political power, specifically the pope and the emperor, implicitly pitting the free movement inherent in a market economy against the coercive violence of the political state.