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Venice (Renaissance and Reformation)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The city of Venice was unique in European history: an independent republic that endured for more than one thousand years, from the 8th to the 18th century. It was a commercial powerhouse, a laboratory of political systems, an exemplar of social cohesion, a principal contributor (along with Florence and Rome) to the culture of the Renaissance, and above all, an entity severed from the mainland, a creature of the sea, and the single most important intermediary between Europe and the regions of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Byzantine and Islamic countries. The city understood itself as unique, as much as we do, almost from the beginning of its rise to prominence during the 12th century. In chronicles and treatises, in the arts and literature, and in distinctive civic and religious rituals, its advocates portrayed the city as exceptional in achievement, capacity, and moral stature, constructing what has come to be known as the “myth of Venice.” For these reasons, scholars have returned often to consider again the principal features of the Venetian phenomenon in every century since its rise, resulting in a complex historiographical tradition. This article maps out major resources and categories of investigation for Venice proper, not the larger Veneto region, and confines itself to printed materials, without citing manuscripts.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. Although scholars began to record the history of Venice while the Republic still existed, and several multivolume histories appeared during the 19th century, the focus here is on the study of Venice since World War II, and especially in the most-recent decades. Many valuable contributions have appeared in collections of studies, sometimes the product of conferences held in Venice on a stated topic, and these should not be neglected in favor of single- or dual-authored works.
  8.  
  9. Collections of Studies
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  11. Multivolume collections of studies edited by Italian scholars on the history of Venice or Venetian “civilization,” such as Arnaldi, et al. 1976–1986; Benzoni and Menniti Ippolito 1991–1998; and Branca 1979, are an important first step in approaching any topic in Venetian history. The numerous contributors tend to be known experts, many of whose names are found scattered throughout this article as the authors of monographs on the economy, politics, society, and literary and artistic culture of Venice. After some lapse of years, the appearance of Dursteler 2013 offers an updated overview in something over a thousand pages, with essays by a mix of European and English-speaking authors on multiple aspects of the political, environmental, economic, social, and cultural worlds of Venice. Of a different sort, less encyclopedic but tending more to interpretation and the identification of historiographical issues, are the largely anglophone essay collections: Hale 1973, which has served a generation of newcomers as an introduction to Venetian studies, and Martin and Romano 2000, which extends and to some extent supplants it.
  12.  
  13. Arnaldi, Girolamo, Gianfranco Folena, and Marino Berengo, eds. Storia della cultura Veneta. 6 vols. Vicenza, Italy: Neri Pozza, 1976–1986.
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  15. Massive overview of the Venetian “civilization” (intellectual culture broadly understood), including many expert contributions. For the Renaissance era, Vol. 2 deals with the 14th century; Vol. 3 (in 3 parts), the early 15th and 16th centuries; Vol. 4 (in 2 parts), the 17th century; and Vol. 5 (in 2 parts), the 18th century. Still indispensable.
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  17. Benzoni, Gino, and Antonio Menniti Ippolito, eds. Storia di Venezia: Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima. 8 vols. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1991–1998.
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  19. Vast compilation of studies, with six volumes (2 through 7) on the Renaissance era, with Girolamo Arnaldi, Gino Benzoni, Gaetano Cozzi, Giorgio Cracco, Paolo Prodi, Alberto Tenenti, and Ugo Tucci as volume editors. Culminates with a final volume, numbered 12, on “the sea,” edited by Tenenti and Tucci.
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  21. Branca, Vittore, ed. Storia della civiltà veneziana. 3 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1979.
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  23. Useful overview of Venetian “civilization” (intellectual and artistic culture broadly understood, including economic, political, and diplomatic context) from its origins until modern times. The second volume, Autunno del Medioevo e Rinascimento, deals with the 14th and 15th centuries, and the third, Dall’età Barocca all’Italia contemporanea, covers the 16th through 20th centuries.
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  25. Dursteler, Eric R., ed. A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797. Brill’s Companions to European History 4. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2013.
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  27. A daringly executed collection of twenty-six substantial and authoritative essays, presenting as a whole the accumulated understandings of the Venetian experience acquired over the last generation by an international array of scholars.
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  29. Hale, J. R., ed. Renaissance Venice. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.
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  31. Sixteen essays by the leading luminaries of Venetian studies at the time of publication, including Vittore Branca, Stanley Chojnacki, Felix Gilbert, Frederic Lane, Michael Mallett, Brian Pullan, Donald Queller, and Alberto Tenenti, on topics including politics, society, and culture, and especially highlighting the “myth of Venice” and the crisis of the League of Cambrai (1509–1510).
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  33. Martin, John J., and Dennis Romano, eds. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  35. Nearly thirty years later, a follow-up to the classic Hale 1973, with fifteen essays displaying the diversity of more-recent approaches to the study of Venice. Especially valuable are the editors’ historiographical overview confronting the enduring problem of the “myth of Venice,” and Claudio Povolo’s final essay, “The Creation of Venetian Historiography.”
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  37. Single- or Dual-Authored Works
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  39. Rather different syntheses of Venetian history are offered by the two volumes of Cozzi and Knapton 1986–1992, which examines the development of the Venetian state and empire, and the broader, more popular Norwich 1982 and Zorzi 1983, superseding earlier comprehensive histories. More focused are Chambers 1971, which zeroes in on a two-century era of maximum imperial pretensions, while the narrative offered by Lane 1973, while extending from the earliest to the last days of the republic, attends especially to shipping and commerce, a story of which Frederic Lane was the master. Crouzet-Pavan 2002 explores the symbols and ideations that expressed the identity of a “triumphant” Venice that had mastered a maritime and territorial empire. Appearing virtually at the same moment, Ferraro 2012 and Madden 2012 offer two quite different overviews of the history of Venice, best read in tandem. Grubb 1986, finally, offers a synthesis of a different sort: a masterful analysis of the historiographical fortunes of the “myth of Venice.”
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  41. Chambers, David S. The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580. History of European Civilization Library. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
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  43. Reaching from the moment of its ultimate maritime success and extending over the two centuries in which Venice secured its control over the terraferma, the author explores the mechanisms of power exerted both by doge and nobility and their cultural emanations when the city reached the zenith of its imperial ambitions.
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  45. Cozzi, Gaetano, and Michael Knapton. La repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna. 2 vols. Turin, Italy: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1986–1992.
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  47. Cozzi’s master hand guides these volumes written with the collaboration of Knapton (Vol. 1, Dalla guerra di Chioggia al 1517, and Vol. 2, Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica) and, in addition, with Giovanni Scarabello (Vol. 2), which together cover the development of the Venetian dominion at home, at sea, and on land, from the 1380s to 1797, emphasizing foreign relations and state finance. Both works are parts of Vol. 12 of the series Storia d’Italia.
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  49. Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth. Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
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  51. Building on her environmental history of Venice and its lagoon (Crouzet-Pavan 1992, cited under Environment, Health, and Welfare), the author extends her spatial analysis to Venetian expansion in the Adriatic and Mediterranean and even the Italian terraferma (mainland) to explain the genesis of the particular set of symbols and forms that constituted the reality of Venice. Original French publication is titled Venise triomphante: Les horizons d’un mythe (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999).
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  53. Ferraro, Joanne M. Venice: History of the Floating City. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  54. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139029933Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55. A history of Venice especially concerned with the people who flowed in and out, made it work, consumed its goods, and built its wealth—people of diverse ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities; less concerned with its rulers, its governance, or the battles it fought.
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  57. Grubb, James S. “When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography.” Journal of Modern History 58.1 (1986): 43–94.
  58. DOI: 10.1086/242943Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  59. An exceptionally thorough and astute overview of the treatment by historians of the “myth of Venice.”
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  61. Lane, Frederic Chapin. Venice, a Maritime Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
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  63. By the premier American economic historian of Venice, surveys the whole thousand-year history while focusing on the 11th through 16th centuries and benefiting from the author’s vast knowledge of shipbuilding and maritime enterprise. Faulted by some reviewers for its neglect of the political and cultural role of Venice in the Italian framework.
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  65. Madden, Thomas F. Venice: A New History. New York: Viking, 2012.
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  67. A “new” history that updates older narratives while giving due attention to the important formative stage of the city’s evolution, its relations with Byzantium, and its crucial role in the era of the Crusades, while not slighting its mainland ventures, engagement in Renaissance culture, and confrontation of the emergent Ottoman threat.
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  69. Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. New York: Knopf, 1982.
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  71. Elegantly written, sprawling popular account of the whole span of Venetian history. First American edition in a single volume based on the English original in two volumes: Vol. 1, Venice, the Rise to Empire (London: Allen Lane, 1977); Vol. 2, Venice, the Greatness and the Fall (1981).
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  73. Zorzi, Alvise. Venice, the Golden Age, 697–1797. Translated by Nicoletta Simborowski and Simon Mackenzie. New York: Abbeville, 1983.
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  75. Compact, splendidly illustrated work by an expert on the history and monuments of Venice. A quick introduction that yet pays attention to the Venetian state system, commercial institutions, maritime and terraferma possessions, and naval and military activity. Original Italian publication is titled Una città, una repubblica, un’impero: Venezia, 697–1797, 2d ed. (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1980).
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  77. Guides to Collections
  78.  
  79. Among the many that exist, the two principal institutions that scholars will consult in Venice are the Archivio di Stato di Veneiza and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, both of which have excellent online catalogues, cited here.
  80.  
  81. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.
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  83. Description, guide, and history of the printed book and art and cartographic collections, with list of relevant print catalogues and links to online catalogues. The guide to more than thirteen thousand manuscripts offers a description of the cataloguing system, and links to lists of catalogues, manuscript and printed, for the different collections (Greek, Latin, Italian, etc.). Still in the process of development.
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  85. Guida On-line SiASVe.
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  87. Indexes more than 1,500 fonds (registers or series of registers or bundles) and finding aids, giving descriptions and references to relevant print and manuscript inventories, which are incorporated but not entirely superseded. Multiple search possibilities in Italian or English.
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  89. Primary Sources
  90.  
  91. Venetians began to write their own history as early as the 13th century and then branched out in the Renaissance to diaries, autobiographies, and descriptive works, all usefully consulted by modern researchers, in addition to abundant official sources, both manuscript and published. Of the many chronicles and histories of Venice written since the 13th century, only two publications issued since the end of the 20th century are noted here: the humanist history by the man of letters Pietro Bembo (Bembo 2007–2009), one of the publicly appointed historians, and the unofficial and idiosyncratic chronicle of Antonio Morosini (Morosini 1999–2005). The personal voices of the diarists Girolamo Priuli (Priuli 1912–1938) and Marino Sanudo (Sanudo 1969–1979, Sanudo 2008) provide a corrective to the often-bland official or humanist records of events around the turn of the 16th century, which critically altered Venice’s future. In its variety and specificity, likewise, the sprawling description of Venice by Francesco Sansovino (Sansovino 1968) brings vividly to life the city as it stood at the turn of the 17th century. Although the many published collections of official documents are too numerous to report here, mention must be made of Chambers, et al. 2001, a single-volume anthology of excerpts from a full range of official and literary sources, which provides a valuable introduction to the range of historical issues and sources.
  92.  
  93. Bembo, Pietro. History of Venice. 3 vols. Edited and translated by Robert W. Ulery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007–2009.
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  95. History of “recent” (1487 to 1513) events by the letterato Pietro Bembo, one of six state-appointed “public” historians of the 16th and 17th centuries, now available from the distinguished I Tatti Renaissance Library series. Vol. 1 contains Books I–IV; Vol. 2, Books V–VIII; Vol. 3, Books IX–XII. Bilingual edition (Latin and English, facing pages).
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  97. Chambers, David, and Brian S. Pullan, with Jennifer Fletcher. Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
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  99. Published in association with the Renaissance Society of America. A vast array of documents with analytical introductions, organized thematically under such headings as “crime and punishment,” “the regulation of society” (against the threats of plague, famine, and sexual immorality), and the “social orders.” Provides a thorough introduction to the history of Venice and the range of its documentary sources. Originally published in 1992 (Oxford: Blackwell).
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  101. Morosini, Antonio. The Morosini Codex. 3 vols. Edited by Michele Pietro Ghezzo, John R. Melville-Jones, and Andrea Rizzi. Padua, Italy: Unipress, 1999–2005.
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  103. Critical edition of an important chronicle written in the early 15th century, whose acid-tongued author (b. 1365) was a living witness to the later events recorded. Vol. 1 extends to the death of Andrea Dandolo (1354); Vol. 2, from 1354 to 1400; and Vol. 3, on the reign of Michele Steno, from 1400 to 1407. Bilingual edition with facing veneziano (Venetian dialect) and English text.
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  105. Priuli, Girolamo. I diarii di Girolamo Priuli: Anni 1494–1512. 4 vols. New ed. Edited by L. A. Muratori, Arturo Segrè, and Roberto Cessi. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 24.3. Città di Castello, Italy: S. Lapi, 1912–1938.
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  107. Insider’s observations of political machinations during early stages of Italian wars, culminating in the crisis of the League of Cambrai. Vol. 1 edited by Arturo Segrè (Città di Castello, Italy: S. Lapi, 1912); Vols. 2–4 edited by Roberto Cessi (Bologna, Italy: N. Zanichelli, 1938).
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  109. Sansovino, Francesco. Venetia città nobilissima et singolare. Additions by Giustiniano Martinioni. Farnborough, UK: Gregg, 1968.
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  111. Copious description of the leading doges and senators, laws and customs, palaces and churches, and miscellaneous other anecdotes by Sansovino, complete to 1580, and expanded by Martinioni for the period 1580 to 1663. Edition printed in 1663, which was based on original edition of 1581.
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  113. Sanudo, Marino. I diarii di Marino Sanuto. Edited by Rinaldo Fulin, Federico Stefani, Nicolò Barozzi, Guglielmo Berchet, and Marco Allegri. 58 vols. Bologna, Italy: Forni Editore, 1969–1979.
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  115. Massive, variegate ramblings through the corridors of power and the canals and alleyways of Venice, by a sharp-eyed lesser member of the patrician elite who refused to organize his perceptions into a coherent system but offers peerless insight into the workings of the city. Originally printed 1879–1903.
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  117. Sanudo, Marino. Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo. Edited by Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White. Translated by Linda L. Carroll. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
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  119. Masterful collection of excerpts selected and translated from the fifty-eight volumes of Sanudo’s complete Diaries, whose thematic organization in itself offers an analysis of that author’s principal concerns, providing a structure that he himself declined to supply.
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  121. Journals and Serials
  122.  
  123. The journals cited here are the three principal ones specific to Venice, all still active. All publish a variety of articles on a full range of topics relating to the history of Venice and Venetian civilization. Archivio veneto and Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti published their first issues in the 19th century and have since published continually, although in various numbers and with variant titles. Studi veneziani, launched in 1959, is published by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, a sponsor of many scholarly conferences and cultural events. Not all titles or full runs are regularly available in American research libraries; they may be available only in microform.
  124.  
  125. Archivio veneto. 1871–.
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  127. Also published under the variant titles Nuovo archivio veneto and Archivio veneto-tridentino. Published by the Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie, which also publishes series of monographs and edited documents.
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  129. Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Parte 2: Classe di scienze morali, lettere, ed arti. 1841–.
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  131. Published under slightly variant titles by the Istituto, which also publishes series of monographs and documents. More information on its publications is available online.
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  133. Studi veneziani. 1959–.
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  135. Titled Bollettino dell’Istituto di storia della società e dello stato veneziano until 1965. Published by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, which also sponsors conferences and book publications. Issues from 2002 and later available online.
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  137. Politics and Governance
  138.  
  139. The study of the Venetian state began as early as the 16th century and was highly developed by the 19th, by which time governance structures had been systematically described. More-recent studies have turned to analysis, as does Cracco 1967, which studies the state system in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, while Romano 2007 does so for the 15th century; Finlay 1980, for the early 16th. Queller 1986 studies the often-irresponsible behavior of the patriciate, while Gilbert 1980 examines the multiple players involved in one set of negotiations in a single year, and Shaw 2006 explores how ordinary Venetians accessed the Venetian system of justice.
  140.  
  141. Cracco, Giorgio. Società e stato nel medioevo veneziano (secoli XII–XIV). Florence: Olschki, 1967.
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  143. Studies the consolidation of the Venetian state system with, in consequence, its growing capacity for social control, in the transition of the famous serrata (closing) of the Great Council from the late 13th century to the 14th.
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  145. Finlay, Robert. Politics in Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980.
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  147. Examining the period 1490 to 1530, shows how the Venetian constitution operated not as portrayed by the widely bandied “myth” of Venetian incorruptibility but in fact by the sale of votes and offices and a pragmatic indifference to illegalities.
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  149. Gilbert, Felix. The Pope, His Banker, and Venice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
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  151. Investigates Venetian and papal politics following Venice’s defeat at Agnadello during the war of the League of Cambrai, focusing on the negotiations of a loan made to Venice in 1511 by the wealthy banker and papal representative Agostino Chigi.
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  153. Queller, Donald E. The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986.
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  155. Debunks the myth, for those who still believed it, of a selfless patriciate and proposes a self-serving one whose main object in pursuing government office is to maximize wealth and access to advancement. Some reviewers have found the argument overstated.
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  157. Romano, Dennis. The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373–1457. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
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  159. Focuses on the preeminent doge of the 15th century, who presided over Venice’s push to control the terraferma, considering the relations among constitutional structures, dogal ambitions, family interests and failures, and patronage of the arts. The place to start to understand the Venetian state in its imperial age.
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  161. Shaw, James E. The Justice of Venice: Authorities and Liberties in the Urban Economy, 1550–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  162. DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197263778.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  163. Studies the Venetian court tasked with marketplace disputes, which, operating with remarkable flexibility and common sense, allowed commoner tradesmen and consumers to resolve their complaints at minimal cost, and thus at a level below the elite to secure the stability of the Venetian state.
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  165. Sources
  166.  
  167. Gasparo Contarini, a leading Venetian nobleman, diplomat, reformer, cardinal, and humanist, was also the author of the first and best guide to the structure of Venetian government: Contarini 2003. Kohn, et al. 2009 provides a searchable online database of holders of major offices of the Venetian state from the early 14th through early 16th centuries.
  168.  
  169. Contarini, Gasparo. La republica e i magistrati di Vinegia. Edited by Vittorio Conti. Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2003.
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  171. Offers a comprehensive contemporaneous account of the mechanisms of Venetian governance. Based on the 1544 edition by Lodovico Domenichi (Venice: Appresso Girolamo Scotto).
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  173. Kohl, Benjamin G., Andrea Mozzato, and Monique O’Connell, comps. and eds. The Rulers of Venice, 1332–1524: Database, Interpretations, Essays. Version 4.02 (9 September 2009).
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  175. Searchable database by office, name, year, and city of the major magistracies (councilors, ambassadors, governors, etc.) of the Venetian state for nearly two hundred years, accompanied by essays about the data collection and management.
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  177. Environment, Health, and Welfare
  178.  
  179. Crouzet-Pavan 1992 provides an ecological history of Venice, showing how the necessity of building amid the waters shaped the city’s identity, while Appuhn 2009 explores Venice’s program of environmental regulation in its mainland dominion, and Crawshaw 2012 examines its equally vigorous management of plague containment and treatment.
  180.  
  181. Appuhn, Karl Richard. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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  183. Traces the vigorous regulatory regime that Venice—a city that had no forests within its original boundaries—exercised in its terraferma dominions, with the aim of securing the supplies of timber essential not only for fuel but for its maritime commercial and imperial ventures.
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  185. Crawshaw, Jane L. Stevens. Stevens. Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice. History of Medicine in Context. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012.
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  187. Shows how Venice, in one case of the early modern delivery of public health, exploited its unique resource of a congeries of islands, naturally isolated by the sea, for purposes of the quarantine and containment of the sick and burial of the dead.
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  189. Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth. Sopra le acque salse: Espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age. Nuovi Studi Storici 14. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1992.
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  191. Ecological history of Venice, arguing that the imperative to command the waters of the lagoon promoted a culture of cohesion and the structures of Venetian society and spaces. In the 15th century, with the waters conquered, a hierarchy of space was established, with public centers predominant over local ones.
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  193. Maritime Empire
  194.  
  195. Venice’s first dominion was of the sea, beginning with its own lagoon and extending to a network of commercial depots, protectorates, and colonies in the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean, requiring a skilled merchant elite and advanced shipping technology. Dominating this maritime realm brought Venice into contact with many states in the eastern Mediterranean: the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and the Levantine states circling south and west to Egypt, all under Islamic rule. Exposed as it was to the sea, Venice also nurtured merchants and navigators who ventured out to explore its distant places.
  196.  
  197. Trade and Colonies
  198.  
  199. Written not by a Venetian specialist but by a world historian, McNeill 1974 first drew attention to Venice’s pivotal role as the intermediary between western and eastern Mediterranean regions and their hinterlands. As boldly, Tenenti 1999 examines from multiple perspectives Venice’s relationship to the sea across five hundred years, while Hocquet 1978 focuses on a single commodity, salt, as the explanatory key to Venetian maritime dominion. Arbel 1995 examines the Venetian reliance on Jewish intermediaries in a Mediterranean under Ottoman control, and McKee 2000 examines relations between western “Latins” and native “Greeks” in the exemplary Venetian colony of Crete. O’Connell 2009, finally, studies the interrelationships of individuals, families, and institutions that administered the Venetian maritime empire.
  200.  
  201. Arbel, Benjamin. Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early-Modern Eastern Mediterranean. Leiden, The Netherlands, and New York: Brill, 1995.
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  203. Studies the newly prominent role of Jewish merchants as agents of Ottoman commerce and intermediaries in Venetian trade, leading Venice to adopt a posture of grudging tolerance. Includes five previously published, updated studies.
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  205. Hocquet, Jean Claude. Le sel et la fortune de Venise. 2 vols. Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France: Publications de l’Université de Lille III, 1978.
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  207. Reinterpretation of Venetian economic history as anchored in the plebeian Mediterranean commodity—salt; the need to obtain it from colonial depots whose fortunes were shifting drives Venetian strategy over the centuries of its dominance.
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  209. McKee, Sally. Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
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  211. Based on an exhaustive study of wills from Venetian-dominated Crete, studies the population groups considered “Latin” and “Greek,” roughly consisting of the colonizers and the colonized, and finds the boundaries rendered indistinct by the marital strategies and political ambitions of elite native families.
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  213. McNeill, William Hardy. Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
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  215. Views the history of Venice in a broad framework that includes not only Europe but also the eastern Mediterranean regions and the lands beyond in Russia and the Balkans, identifying the city famously as the “hinge,” or fulcrum, of the premodern economic and geopolitical system.
  216. Find this resource:
  217. O’Connell, Monique. Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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  219. Examines the institutions, laws, and networks that enabled the small Venetian state to manage a diverse maritime empire, emphasizing the role of patrician experts who, as governors, served as intermediaries between native populations and the metropole.
  220. Find this resource:
  221. Tenenti, Alberto. Venezia e il senso del mare: Storia di un prisma culturale dal XIII al XVIII secolo. Milan: Guerini, 1999.
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  223. Collection of twenty-five of Tenenti’s essays, many previously published, examining from multiple perspectives Venice’s crucial relationship to the sea, ranging from a portrait of shipboard life to evocations of the storms and mists of the maritime environment.
  224. Find this resource:
  225. Banking, Shipping, and Merchant Enterprises
  226.  
  227. The maritime empire was managed by merchants based in Venice who developed a sophisticated banking system, mercantile enterprises, and shipbuilding industry. Lane and Mueller 1985 and Mueller 1997 provide a comprehensive account of money and banking, rounded out by Stahl 2000, which describes the operation of the Venetian mint. Mackenney 1987 describes the activity of the Venetian guilds, while Molà 2000 traces the growth of one key industry, silk manufacture, and van Gelder 2009 considers the community of merchants from the Low Countries who, like the better-known Germans and Turks, established a foothold in Venice. Turning to shipbuilding, an activity fundamental to Venetian power and success, Davis 1991 examines the city’s most important enterprise, the state-run industry housed in the Arsenal, while Candiani 2009 examines the political and military context for shipbuilding endeavors in later early modern Venice.
  228.  
  229. Candiani, Guido. I vascelli della Serenissima: Guerra, politica e costruzioni navali a Venezia in età moderna, 1650–1720. Memorie 130. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2009.
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  231. Explores the late stage of accelerated state naval production spurred by conflicts with the Ottomans from 1645 to 1718, resulting in the loss of Crete and the Morea and the extinction of Venetian dominion in the eastern Mediterranean.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Davis, Robert C. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
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  235. Examines the state-run shipbuilding industry in Venice’s “Arsenal,” a sixty-acre shipyard that constituted a large section of the city; the organization of workers in a system anticipating modern factory conditions; their lives in the residential zone adjacent to the shipyard; and their participation in the civic life of Venice.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Lane, Frederic C., and Reinhold C. Mueller. Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Vol. 1, Coins and Moneys of Account. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
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  239. Definitive study of Venetian coinage from the 12th to 16th centuries. Considers rival coinages, the relative value of silver and gold, and “moneys of account” used only for record keeping. First volume of a two-volume project that culminated in the separately published Mueller 1997.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987.
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  243. Employs the example of the Venetian guilds, which he sees as dynamic and creative into the 17th century, to argue against the view that guilds retarded industrial and commercial innovation in early modern Europe.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Molà, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  247. Traces the establishment of the silk industry in 14th-century Venice and its evolution over the next two centuries, involving tensions between free trade and protectionism and experimentation with new textile blends and dyes.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Mueller, Reinhold C. Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Vol. 2, The Venetian Money Market: Banks, Panics, and the Public Debt, 1200–1500. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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  251. Examines banking practices and bank failures, the operations in Venice of an international money market, and the evolution of the public debt into a state-managed investment bank. Lane died in 1984; Mueller here completes the project the two authors began in the separately published Lane and Mueller 1985.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Stahl, Alan M. Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  255. Definitive study of the establishment and operation of the Venetian mint, an enterprise second in size only to the city’s shipbuilding Arsenal, producing some of the most reliable and widely circulated coins in Mediterranean and European trade. Published in association with the American Numismatic Society.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. van Gelder, Maartje. Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern Venice. Library of Economic History 1. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2009.
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  259. As Venetian commerce struggled in the later 16th century, and that of Amsterdam concurrently rose, new links developed between the merchant communities of these northern and southern poles of European trade, driven by the Italian city’s hunger for grain from the Baltic ports served by the Dutch fleet.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Byzantine, Ottoman, and Levantine Relations
  262.  
  263. Venice began as a Byzantine colony but had dominated Byzantium by the 13th century and in the 15th century watched impotently as Constantinople fell to the assault of the Ottoman Turks. Failing to halt the advance of the Ottoman Empire, Venice became a principal European agent in Constantinople through the 18th century. Nicol 1988 and Ravegnani 2006 trace the whole course of relations between Venice and Byzantium from the founding of Venice to the conquest of Constantinople, while Costantini 2009, Dursteler 2006, Preto 1975, Rothman 2012, and Setton 1991 examine different aspects of Venetian relations with the Turks after their establishment of the Ottoman regime. Meanwhile, even as Byzantine power rose, fell, and yielded to Ottoman dominion, Venice pursued relations with the other Islamic powers of the Levant, as is detailed in Christ 2012, a microscopic study, and the constituent essays of Carboni 2007 survey across a span of one thousand years.
  264.  
  265. Carboni, Stefano, ed. Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007.
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  267. Spurred by commercial objectives, the long Venetian encounter with the Islamic world resulted in a harvest of exotic visions, objects, and memories, brought home and woven into the fabric of native Venetian culture. Contains eight essays on different aspects of the artistic encounter between West and East, followed by a catalogue of objects exhibited in Paris and New York, 2006–2007.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Christ, Georg. Trading Conflicts: Venetian Merchants and Mamluk Offficials in Late Medieval Alexandria. Medieval Mediterranean 93. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2012.
  270. DOI: 10.1163/9789004222007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. Describes the Venetian commercial network in the 15th-century Mamluk realm, centering on the consulate of Alexandria and, in particular, the consul Biagio Dolfin, accompanied by narratives of the Venetian acquisition of the head of Saint Mark and other episodes of the Venetians’ Egyptian residence reflective of the religious and ideological tensions between the host community and the visitors.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Costantini, Vera. Il sultano e l’isola contesa: Cipro tra eredità veneziana e potere ottomano. Turin, Italy: UTET Libreria, 2009.
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  275. Using both Ottoman and Venetian sources, portrays the Venetianized society of Cyprus prior to the Ottoman takeover in 1570–1573, and the continuing relations between the new and former dominators of the colony, and the wily survivalism of the island’s natives.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Dursteler, Eric. Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
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  279. Studies the Venetian “nation” in Ottoman-ruled Constantinople, an enclave populated by about one hundred officials, diplomats, and merchants, assisted by scores of secretaries, cipherists, guards, spies, housekeepers, and dragomans, and housing also an open, shifting community of Jews, Greeks, renegades, and slaves.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Nicol, Donald M. Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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  283. A finely written and accessible narrative of relations between Venice and, at first, the superior power of Byzantium, until its last centuries as an imperiled state.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Preto, Paolo. Venezia e i Turchi. Florence: Sansoni, 1975.
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  287. Masterful account primarily of the cultural interface between Venice and the Ottoman Turks in the 16th and 18th centuries, including a discussion of Venetian knowledge of the Turkish language and construction of Ottoman history.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Ravegnani, Giorgio. Bisanzio e Venezia. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 2006.
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  291. Concise overview by an expert Byzantinist of the whole course of Venetian-Byzantine relations, from Venice’s origins as a Byzantine outpost, to its takeover of Constantinople in 1204, to its failure to defend its former protector from invasion and conquest by the Ottoman Turks.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Rothman, E. Natalie. Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.
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  295. Considers the processes by which diplomats, converts, and businessmen managed political obstacles and bridged the cultural barriers of language, religion, and custom that confronted the Venetians and Turks who circulated between the two domains.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Setton, Kenneth M. Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991.
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  299. Detailed account of the last phases of Venice’s struggle against Ottoman power, centering on the siege of Candia and the devastating loss of Crete in 1645–1669, and the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Travel and Exploration
  302.  
  303. Venetian ships plowed the Mediterranean systematically and on a seasonal schedule, but occasionally navigators set out beyond the usual trade routes to explore farther afield, as illustrated by the two highly readable accounts in Bergreen 2007 and Di Robilant 2011 describing the ventures of the famous Marco Polo and the nearly forgotten Zen brothers, respectively.
  304.  
  305. Bergreen, Laurence. Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
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  307. An in-depth and up-to-date biography of the Venetian adventurer Marco Polo (b. 1254–d. 1324), who not only journeyed beyond the familiar Mediterranean world but, in the employ of -the Chinese emperor, gained intimate knowledge of a vastly different culture and lived to bring his insights back to Venice and to resume his mercantile career.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Di Robilant, Andrea. Venetian Navigators: The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.
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  311. Between Marco Polo’s journey to East Asia the century before, and Christopher Columbus’s to the West Indies a century afterward, late in the 14th century two brothers of the noble Venetian Zen family took the route to the north, past the Norwegian-dominated Faroe and Shetland Islands to Norse Iceland and Greenland.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Sources
  314.  
  315. Records of the experience of 15th- and 16th-century navigators and explorers are available in the superb Michael of Rhodes 2009 and Ramusio 1978–1988.
  316.  
  317. Michael of Rhodes. The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript. 3 vols. Edited by Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl. Translated by Alan M. Stahl. Transcribed by Franco Rossi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
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  319. A huge and definitive presentation of the memoir (composed in 1436) of a 15th-century mariner documenting his career on Venetian ships and providing information about navigational technology, the outfitting of ships, and trade routes and communications. Contains a facsimile of the manuscript (Vol. 1, edited by McGee), a transcription of the original text with modern English translation (Vol. 2, edited by Stahl), and a series of related studies (Vol. 3, edited by Long).
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Ramusio, Giovanni Battista. Navigazioni e viaggi. Edited by Marica Milanesi. 6 vols. Turin, Italy: G. Einaudi, 1978–1988.
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  323. Authoritative Italian edition of more than six thousand pages of the 16th-century work (1555–1559) of an armchair traveler. Ramusio’s employment as secretary to a prominent nobleman positioned him to gather and publish navigators’ accounts of their journeys around the world in the first decades of global exploration.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Terraferma Empire
  326.  
  327. The peak of its maritime dominance had already been reached when Venice turned westward to conquer the Italian mainland, or terraferma, in order to defend its political interests in Italy and to secure access to markets and commodities. The essays gathered in Cracco and Knapton 1984 consider multiple aspects of the mainland regime over three centuries, while Del Torre 1986 offers a close examination of one critical fifteen-year period. Mallett and Hale 1984 describes how a maritime state without a standing army gained military control over the terraferma, and Ventura 1993 examines tensions between nobles and people in the terraferma towns, and between colonial nobles and the Venetian state. Ferraro 1993 and Grubb 1996 explore the lives of the patrician families who dominated the terraferma states under Venetian rule, while Bowd 2010 focuses on the relations between the Brescian patriciate and the Venetian metropolis.
  328.  
  329. Bowd, Stephen D. Venice’s Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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  331. Offers a close look at the ruling class of Brescia during the first century of Venetian domination, probing solidarities and fissures as well as tensions with Venetian rule that came to the fore during the wars of the League of Cambrai, 1508–1517.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Cracco, Giorgio, and Michael Knapton, eds. Dentro lo “stado italico”: Venezia e la terraferma fra Quattro e Seicento. Trento, Italy: Gruppo Culturale Civis, 1984.
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  335. Collection of essays by leading specialists examining different aspects of the Venetian domination of the terraferma, including military security, citizen prerogatives, and legal and fiscal systems, in Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, and Trento.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Del Torre, Giuseppe. Venezia e la terraferma dopo la guerra di Cambrai: Fiscalità e amministrazione (1515–1530). Studi e Ricerche Storiche 81. Milan: F. Angeli, 1986.
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  339. Minute examination of Venetian administration of the terraferma dominions after the disastrous war of the League of Cambrai, especially with regard to taxes.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Ferraro, Joanne M. Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580–1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State. Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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  343. Studies the social intersections that welded together the Brescian patriciate, most especially those created by the exchange of women and dowries, and their generally contented exercise of local power under Venetian rule.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Grubb, James S. Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
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  347. Examines the records of thirteen merchant families of middling rank from Verona and Vicenza to assess the nature of domestic and civic life in prosperous cities of moderate size in the shadow of metropolitan Venice.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Mallett, Michael Edward, and J. R. Hale. The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice, c. 1400 to 1617. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
  350. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511562686Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  351. The challenge of mainland expansion required Venice to develop what it had never had before: an army, necessarily a mercenary one, though under the supervision of patrician legates. It innovated effectively, controlling its hired captains, managing new technologies, and handling the problems of recruitment and pay.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Ventura, Angelo. Nobiltà e popolo nella società veneta del Quattrocento e Cinquecento. Milan: Unicopli, 1993.
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  355. Examines tensions between social groups in the terraferma dominions, finding increasing aristocratization of mainland societies (begun even before the Venetian domination), and resistance of those elites to Venetian economic intervention. Reprint of original 1964 edition (Bari, Italy: Laterza).
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Society
  358.  
  359. Two conspicuous features of Venetian Renaissance society were the dominance of a legally defined nobility and the apparent harmony of interclass relations, an appearance contributing to what historians call the “myth of Venice.” Although the myth was not, of course, a depiction of reality, Venetian society was remarkably stable—a stability not threatened but rather reinforced by the assimilation of immigrants both foreign and native, and an influx of Jewish refugees after 1492.
  360.  
  361. Nobles, Citizens, and the Poor
  362.  
  363. The nature of the Venetian nobility has been addressed in Burke 1974 and Cowan 1986, in parallel studies, comparing the Venetian patriciate to that of the northern cities Amsterdam and Lübeck, while Davis 1962 and Hunecke 1995, written a full generation apart, consider the demographic failure of the nobility in the late centuries of the Republic. Zannini 1993 examines the citizen stratum from which Venice recruited its bureaucrats, while Barile, et al. 2006 considers the careers of two successful members of that stratum. Pullan 1971 and Romano 1987 examine the institutions, obligations, and customs that united nobles and citizens, and rich and poor, into the single organism of Venetian society.
  364.  
  365. Barile, Elisabetta, Paula C. Clarke, and Giorgia Nordio. Cittadini veneziani del Quattrocento: I due Giovanni Marcanova, il mercante e l’umanista. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2006.
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  367. Consisting of three essays by each of the three authors, considers two members of the citizen Marcanova family across three generations: an international merchant, and a humanist and antiquarian, both sons of a physician immigrant.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Burke, Peter. Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Élites. London: Temple Smith, 1974.
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  371. Bold and systematic comparison between patriciates of Venice and Amsterdam, the first retreating from commercial enterprise as the second progressed, noting the greater diversity of the Amsterdam elites, and the lesser significance of clan and family in economic life.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Cowan, Alexander. The Urban Patriciate: Lübeck and Venice, 1580–1700. Cologne: Böhlau, 1986.
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  375. Following the lead of Burke 1974, contrasts Venice’s legally defined and closed patriciate to the more open and fluid patriciate of Baltic Lübeck, showing how each in different ways withstood the blows of crisis and change.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Davis, James C. The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1962.
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  379. Explores the mechanisms—principally the choice of marriage strategies and inheritance patterns—that resulted in the diminution and impoverishment of the Venetian nobility from the 16th to 17th centuries, with sad consequences for governance.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Hunecke, Volker. Der venezianische Adel am Ende der Republik, 1646–1797: Demographie, Familie, Haushalt. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1995.
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  383. Studies three hundred lineages and seven hundred households over the last 150 years of the Venetian republic, sorting them according to wealth, antiquity, and relation to political power, adding important substance to the discussion of the decline of a ruling class as a result of its own demographic strategies.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Pullan, Brian S. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
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  387. Reconstructs the system of scuole (a type of confraternity) that united rich and poor in penitential and charitable activity and so knit together Venetian society, constituting one of the mechanisms for its famed stability. Also examines the management of the “new” or “undeserving” poor, and the mainly Jewish moneylending activity.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Romano, Dennis. Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
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  391. Examines the lives in the urban context of families of the patriciate and the popolo grande and popolo minuto (wealthier and poorer commoners), and the networks and structures that connected them. Important discussion of patronage and friendship interrelations of patrician and commoner women at the neighborhood level.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Zannini, Andrea. Burocrazia e burocrati a Venezia in età moderna: I cittadini originari (sec. XVI–XVIII). Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1993.
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  395. Studies the social group of cittadini originari (citizens by birth), unique to Venice, who constituted a hereditary, privileged stratum immediately beneath that of the nobility, for whom was reserved access to secretarial positions in Venetian government, culminating in the top job of grand chancellor.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Strangers and Immigrants
  398.  
  399. While the twenty-four essays in Tiepolo and Tonetti 2002 consider the experience of Greek immigrants in Venice and their contributions to Venetian culture, De Maria 2010 explores the cultural activity of native Italian immigrants to Venice.
  400.  
  401. De Maria, Blake. Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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  403. Focusing on nine cases, explores the commercial and cultural activities of a particular set of immigrant families to Venice—those who had gained citizenship privilege—with particular attention to their confraternal ties and patronage of the arts.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Tiepolo, Maria Francesca, and Eurigio Tonetti, eds. I greci a Venezia: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio, Venezia, 5–7 novembre 1998. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2002.
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  407. Addressing a truly international audience, with essays in Italian and French and abstracts in Italian, Greek, and English, these twenty-four studies look at the Greek diaspora in Venice and other Italian centers; the Greek church in a Catholic society; individual Greeks on Venetian ships or in the Venetian chancery; and Greek manuscripts, the Greek press, and Greek scholars in Venice.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Jews and the Ghetto
  410.  
  411. Like other Italian states, Venice protected Jewish residents grudgingly, finding them useful as moneylenders and bankers. After 1492, to the mainly Ashkenazic Jewish population of Venice was added a large group of Sephardic refugees from Spain and Portugal. Cozzi 1987 and Davis and Ravid 2001, both collections of essays, examine the Jewish experience in Venice from multiple perspectives, while Pullan 1983 considers the persecution of Jews by examining their treatment by the Inquisition, and Finlay 1982 illumines the circumstances amid which the first Jewish ghetto was established; with regard to these, see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article on Ghetto. Exploring the cultural dimensions of the Jewish experience in Venice, Concina, et al. 1991 portrays the cultural world of the ghetto, Israel, et al. 2010 investigates the cultural interactions between the ghettoized Jews and surrounding Christian community, while Dweck 2011 explores the single notable case of scholar and mystic Leone Modena, a ghetto resident.
  412.  
  413. Concina, Ennio, Ugo Camerino, and Donatella Calabi. La città degli ebrei: Il ghetto di Venezia, architettura e urbanistica. Venice: Albrizzi, 1991.
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  415. Consists of two long essays and extensive architectural drawings, with related photographs and documents; reconstructs the cultural life and built environment of the Venetian ghetto and its synagogues.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Cozzi, Gaetano, ed. Gli ebrei e Venezia: Secoli XIV–XVIII. Milan: Edizioni Comunità, 1987.
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  419. More than forty essays in more than eight hundred pages, exploring the activity and culture of Jews in Venice and the Veneto, the relations of the Venetian Jewish community with Iberia and the Levant, the ghettos of Venice and mainland cities, and Jewish banking and moneylending.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Davis, Robert C., and Benjamin C. I. Ravid, eds. The Jews of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
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  423. A collection of eleven essays by leading experts examining the settlement, experience, and culture of the often-prosperous Jews confined, after 1516, to the ghetto of Venice, and thus both assimilated to and isolated from the culture of the surrounding city.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Dweck, Yaacob. The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
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  427. Studies the construction, publication, and reception of The Roaring Lion by mystic and scholar Leone Modena in relation to traditions of Kabbalistic criticism and the legacy of Maimonides.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Finlay, Robert. “The Foundation of the Ghetto: Venice, the Jews, and the War of the League of Cambrai.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 126.2 (1982): 140–154.
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  431. Classic article setting the creation of the Jewish ghetto in the context of the turbulent events of the war of the League of Cambrai.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Israel, Uwe, Robert Jütte, and Reinhold C. Mueller, eds. Interstizi: Culture ebraico-cristiane a Venezia e nei suoi domini dal Medioevo all’età moderna. Papers presented at a conference held in September 2007 in Venice. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010.
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  435. Eighteen contributions originally presented at a 2007 conference attempt to bypass the isolation of the Jewish community within ghetto walls to explore the intersections between Jewish life and that of the larger ambient Christian society, identifying attitudes ranging from commercial interactions and expressions of mutual respect to an aspiration toward the harmonization or even unification of majority and minority cultures.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Pullan, Brian S. The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550–1670. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Studies the prosecution by the Venetian Inquisition of “judaizing” Marrano (nominally Christian) refugees from Iberia and Italian Jewish converts to Catholicism, finding its procedures generally mild and its main concern to be the stability of Venetian society.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Sources
  442.  
  443. The walls of the ghetto were porous, and the intellectuals who flourished there were both transmitters of their particular culture and participants in the cultural world of Venice. Modena 1988 offers a rare autobiography reflective of the ghetto environment; Sulam 2009, among the author’s complete works, verbal duels with Christian male contemporaries.
  444.  
  445. Modena, Leone. The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah. Edited and translated by Marc R. Cohen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
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  447. Unique autobiography written between 1617 and 1648 by Leone Modena, descendant of an Ashkenazic moneylending family resident of the Venetian ghetto, prefaced by three introductions by major scholars relating the text to the early modern histories of the Jews and of Europe.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Sulam, Sarra Copia. Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Early Seventeenth-Century Venice: Sarra Copia Sulam. Edited and translated by Don Harrán. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  450. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226779874.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Complete works of the Jewish woman intellectual, poet, and salonière Sulam (b. 1592–d. 1641), learned in Latin and Greek as well as Italian and Hebrew, who debated theological questions with a contemporary Christian intellectual, bridging the Jewish and Christian communities.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Urban Spaces, Ritual, and Social Behavior
  454.  
  455. Graced with a unique maritime setting, Venice developed distinctive patterns of social and ritual behavior visible both in private and public life. Molmenti 1910–1912, a comprehensive overview of patterns and rituals, is now complemented by more-recent works, Brown 2004 and Casa 2012, which recapture the private worlds both of nobles and commoners by observing the material objects amid which they lived. Muir 1981 shows how civic rituals supported neighborhood solidarity and political unity, while Fenlon 2007 focuses on the central space of the Piazza San Marco as a key to civic consciousness, and Johnson 2011 explores the meaning of the proliferating masks worn by Venetians not only during Carnival but all the year round. Ruggiero 1980 looks at violent crime in relation to social status, while Davis 1994 and Povolo 1997 consider two episodes of violence: the former the recurrent violence of the “war of the fists,” reenacted each year on the border of two Venetian neighborhoods; the latter, a spree of murder and rape committed by a vengeful nobleman from the terraferma hinterland between Vicenza and Verona and prosecuted in Venice. Orlando 2010, finally, looks literally at urban spaces: the networks of streets and roads and circulation of traffic in Veneto locales.
  456.  
  457. Brown, Patricia Fortini. Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. Discusses the attitudes and values of the noble and citizen elites in 16th-century Venice, as revealed in the material objects with which they surrounded themselves and in contemporaneous verbal discussions of those objects in inventories, laws, treatises, and the like. Organized thematically, utilizing a genuinely interdisciplinary approach.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Casa, Isabella Palumbo Fossati. Intérieurs vénitiens à la Renaissance: Maisons, société et culture. Paris: Michel de Maule, 2012.
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  463. An examination of more than six hundred inventories that take us inside the dwelling places of nobles and ordinary folk, homes the size of palaces and homes of just one room, considering their furniture, closets, and kitchens; objects of devotion and decoration; and books, clocks, and coffers.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Davis, Robert C. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Offering a rare picture of the life of commoner Venetians in the 17th century, studies the rivalry between the factions of the Nicolotti and the Castellani, who annually engaged in the “battle of the fists” for possession of the bridges separating their two neighborhood strongholds.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Fenlon, Iain. The Ceremonial City: History, Memory, and Myth in Renaissance Venice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
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  471. Considers Venetian cultural life with the Piazza San Marco as focus from the 9th-century founding of the basilica to the 1570s, a decade of multiple traumatic events that forced a revision of civic consciousness expressed in music, the visual arts, and historical writing.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Johnson, James H. Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
  474. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520267718.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Analyzes the Venetian habit of wearing masks in public, not only during the annual Carnival but as a frequent item of apparel, perhaps to achieve anonymity for covert improprieties or perhaps to complexify the sense of self; it was a custom so prevalent as to persuade the observer that dissimulation was a prominent cultural theme.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Molmenti, Pompeo. La storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalle origini alla caduta della Repubblica. 5th rev. ed. 3 vols. Bergamo, Italy: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1910–1912.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. With the whole of Venice as his canvas, the author traces the changing mores and patterns of the Venetian community and individuals over all the centuries of its existence. The second volume, subtitled Lo splendore (The Splendor), is especially relevant here. Not yet superseded.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Muir, Edward. Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
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  483. Pioneering work that utilized anthropological perspectives to examine the civic life of Venice, identifying publicly performed rituals that sanctified political agendas, enlisted popular support, and helped establish the famous cohesion of Venetian society.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Orlando, Ermanno, ed. Strade, traffici, viabilità in area veneta: Viaggio negli stati comunali. Quaderni del Corpus Statutario delle Venezie 5. Rome: Viella, 2010.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Presents and analyzes law codes (from twenty-eight printed collections) from Veneto towns from the 12th through 15th centuries to reconstruct the experience of travel and mobility, thereby evoking the conditions of daily life as ordinary folk dealt with material obstacles or hauled loads or attempted to communicate with distant places.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Povolo, Claudio. L’intrigo dell onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento. Verona, Italy: Cierre, 1997.
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  491. Microhistory of the 1605 prosecution of a terraferma aristocrat who, in pursuing a family feud, allegedly raped and sodomized several women and assaulted their menfolk, presenting an example of the culture of vendetta prevailing in the Venetian hinterland.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Ruggiero, Guido. Violence in Early Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980.
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  495. Analyzes the prosecution of all forms of violence (assault, rape, murder, and abusive speech) from 1290 to 1406, considering both perpetrators and victims from the perspectives of social class and gender. Finds that the Venetian justice system was generally effective but was biased in favor of the patriciate.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Marriage, Family, and Household
  498.  
  499. Marriage was the key to social status and power, especially among patrician families, as explained in Cowan 2007, while Ferraro 2001 and Hacke 2004 explore cases of marital discord and breakdown in social strata beneath the nobility. Bellavitis 2008 looks critically at the complex system of legal requirements affecting women in families, while Cristellon 2010 analyzes hundreds of cases of marital conflict adjudicated by the patriarchal court. Turning to other issues, Romano 1996 looks at household management, and especially the integration of domestic servants, King 1994 examines the death of an eight-year-old child and its impact on his nobleman father, and the essays in Marangoni and Pastore Stocchi 1996 examine a single patrician family, the Barbaro.
  500.  
  501. Bellavitis, Anna. Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle. Collection de l’École Française de Rome 408. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008.
  502. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. Focuses on the complex system of legal regulations framing family existence in the 16th century, considering paternal authority, rules of inheritance, dowry and guardianship, and property transmission, while distinguishing between the situations of noble, artisan, merchant, professional, and citizen testators.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Cowan, Alexander. Marriage, Manners, and Mobility in Early Modern Venice. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
  506. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. Studies the marriage system of the Venetian nobility, the mechanisms by which a legally defined caste maintained its status and honor. Looks at requirements for legitimate birth, the standards applied to outsider brides, the management of concubinage, and natural offspring.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Cristellon, Cecilia. La carità e l’eros: Il matrimonio, la Chiesa, i suoi giudici nella Venezia del Rinascimento (1420–1545). Bologna, Italy: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 2010.
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  511. Examines 706 cases of marital conflict brought before the office of the Patriarch of Venice for adjudication, representing a cross-section of social situations, in the period from the early 15th to early 16th centuries, which has received little attention from scholars. The petitions principally include challenges to validity of marriage, and requests for nullification or separation.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Ferraro, Joanne M. Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  515. Examines 210 cases of marital breakdown brought before the patriarchal court between 1563 and 1650, finding that women had more recourse than previously thought to remedy their circumstances.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Hacke, Daniela. Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
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  519. Examines hundreds of cases brought before secular and religious courts between 1570 and 1700 both by men and women, often of the artisan stratum; considers complaints by women fearful of domestic violence, charges of adultery, and cases against men accused of rape, impotence, or broken marriage promises.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. King, Margaret L. The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
  522. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226436272.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  523. Examines the death of the eight-year-old son of a powerful statesman and humanist, whose incessant grief led him to commission a series of consolatory treatises that create a monument both to the child and himself. Important for family relations, attitudes toward death, and cultural patronage.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Marangoni, Michela, and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, eds. Una famiglia veneziana nella storia: I Barbaro; Atti del convegno di studi in occasione del quinto centenario della morte dell’umanista Ermolao, Venezia, 4–6 novembre 1992. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1996.
  526. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. Examines from multiple perspectives a single patrician family, the Barbaro, from whom issued a raft of statesmen, entrepreneurs, and clerics over the Renaissance period, among them the explorer Giosafat Barbaro; the famous humanists Francesco Barbaro and Ermolao Barbaro the Younger; the later Francesco Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia; and Cardinal Daniele Barbaro, translator of Vitruvius and patron of Palladio.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Romano, Dennis. Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
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  531. Examines the role of servants in the complex households of wealthy Venetian families, considering the conditions of domestic labor and the anxieties of patriarchs as Venice matured from a mercantile to an aristocratic society. Creative use of archival and literary evidence.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Source
  534.  
  535. Family memoirs are rare in Venice, making the collection of five made available in Grubb and Bellavitis 2009 all the more valuable.
  536.  
  537. Grubb, James S., and Anna Bellavitis, eds. Family Memoirs from Venice (15th–17th Centuries). Rome: Viella, 2009.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. Publishes five family memoirs, a genre that was rare in Venice although profuse in Florence and some other cities, even more remarkable in that the families documented are not noble, but rather of the “original citizen” rank. Texts are in Latin and Italian, with invaluable introductions and annotations in English and Italian by the editors.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Gender and Sexuality
  542.  
  543. Venetian society has often been viewed as rigid and conservative, yet women played significant roles in Venetian life. Chojnacka 2001 shows how commoner women often headed households, managed wealth, and moved freely throughout the city. Chojnacki 2000 (a collection of Stanley Chojnacki’s essays), Guzzetti 1998, and, in their sum, the essays in Bellavitis, et al. 2012 show patrician women enjoying considerable freedom to control their own wealth and even affect family and public decisions. Hurlburt 2006 finds that the dogaresse (doge’s wives), likewise, could informally exercise considerable influence. In another key, Ruggiero 1985 and Ruggiero 1993 study the prosecution of sex crimes and of love magic, respectively, both indicators of a booming culture of illicit sexuality in Venice, while Ferraro 2008 examines the impact of illicit sex on the lives of women, who were often accused of “nefarious crimes” in consequence. Labalme 1981, finally, introduces the trio of feminist voices heard in Venice around the year 1600.
  544.  
  545. Bellavitis, Anna, Nadia Maria Filippini, and Tiziana Plebani, eds. Spazi, poteri, diritti delle donne a Venezia in età moderna. Papers presented at a conference held 8–10 May 2008 in Venice. Verona, Italy: QuiEdit, 2012.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. Presents a rich harvest of twenty-eight essays illuminating women’s lives with regard to marriage and property, social networks, occupations, and religious and cultural activities, showing that the restrictions imposed by the patriarchal system inscribed in Roman law were mitigated in Venice, whose merchant families depended on affable relations in matrimonial exchange.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Chojnacka, Monica. Working Women of Early Modern Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
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  551. Examines records of the Inquisition as well as notarial and fiscal documents to study the condition both of commoner and elite women of the 16th and 17th centuries, finding that they were often heads of households, managers of their own wealth, active in supervisory roles in charitable institutions, and highly mobile (elite women less so) across the city.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Chojnacki, Stanley. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  555. Gathers classic essays that explore how the state disciplined the patriciate by regulating marriage, reveal the considerable capacity of wives and widows to promote family interests and to manage their own dowry wealth, and show how men adjusted sexual lives to serve familial and political goals.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Ferraro, Joanne M. Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
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  559. Drawing on judicial records of fifteen trials from the last two centuries of the Republic, documents the plight of unwed mothers who were victims of incest or other sexual assault, who attempted abortion, or who were charged with infanticide.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Guzzetti, Linda. Venezianische Vermächtnisse: Die soziale und wirtschaftliche Situation von Frauen im Spiegel spätmittelalterlicher Testamente. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1998.
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  563. Analyzes 1,005 wills by women (and 200 by male) testators in 14th-century Venice, showing that women had greater freedom to make wills and to distribute (and inherit) property in Venice than elsewhere in Italy, often exercising that privilege in favor of their female kin and acquaintances.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Hurlburt, Holly S. The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500: Wife and Icon. New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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  567. Juxtaposes the theoretical position of the dogaressa as faceless consort of a faceless ruler with the emerging reality during the Renaissance of a female political figure who, though indirectly through familial and other interpersonal connections, played a significant role in Venetian governance.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Labalme, Patricia H. “Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists.” Archivio Veneto, 5th ser. 117 (1981): 81–109.
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  571. Classic article first introducing the anglophone scholarly audience to the three Venetian feminists writing just before and after 1600: Moderata Fonte (pseudonym Modesta da Pozzo), Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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  575. Studies the prosecution of sex crimes—fornication, adultery, rape, sodomy, and sexual incidents in convents—from the 1320s to 1500, highlighting the government’s crackdown on behavior seen as threatening to civic order, and detecting the origins of a modern culture of illicit sexuality.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Ruggiero, Guido. Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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  579. Examines five cases from the period 1570–1591, drawn from the Venetian archives, of the illicit use of magic, mostly by women, to achieve a “binding passion,” or love relationship with an indifferent other—and in so doing offers insight into the lives of ordinary people.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Sources
  582.  
  583. Venice was also the home of the three major women resisters of patriarchal control of women in Italy and, arguably, in Europe. Fonte 1997 and Marinella 1999 (both works first published, coincidentally, in the same year, 1600) attack the social and intellectual systems, respectively, that kept women subordinate, while Fonte’s and Marinella’s contemporary, the nun Arcangela Tarabotti, is featured in the section on Religion and Gender.
  584.  
  585. Fonte, Moderata. The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men. Edited and translated by Virginia Cox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
  586. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226256832.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. Daring vernacular dialogue (first published in 1600) among seven women of different conditions who criticize paternal authority and the dowry-driven marriage system that effect the subordination and humiliation of women. First major work by a woman to criticize social institutions inimical to women’s freedom and happiness.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Marinella, Lucrezia. The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men. Edited and translated by Anne Dunhill. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
  590. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226505503.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  591. Fierce response (first published in 1600) to an attack on women’s defects, drawing on the philosophical, humanist, literary, theological, and medical traditions to demonstrate instead the nobility of women and inferiority of men.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. The Church
  594.  
  595. The Venetian church operated as much as possible as an entity independent of Rome, even as Venetian clerics figured significantly among Roman popes and cardinals. Religion in Venice featured intense popular piety, often linked to neighborhood rituals; reverence for numerous relics; the abundant presence of religious houses and parish churches; a reformist tradition; and a state cult interwoven with religious practice—in which regard it is often noted that the basilica of San Marco, the city’s principal church, was not the cathedral of bishop, archbishop, or patriarch, but the doge’s chapel. The eight volumes of the Chiesa di Venezia (published 1987–1997) consist of collected essays surveying these aspects and others of the Venetian church, of which three (Betto, et al. 1989; Benzoni, et al. 1990; Betto, et al. 1992) pertain to the Renaissance era. In the early 21st century, scholars have turned their attention to cultural and thematic dimensions of religion in Venice: to the effects of the Reformation crises, including conflicts with Rome and the proliferation and (relatively mild) prosecution of heterodoxy in Venice, and to the relations between religion and gender in the Venetian setting.
  596.  
  597. Benzoni, Gino, Gaetano Cozzi, and Stefania Mason Rinaldi, eds. La chiesa di Venezia tra riforma protestante e riforma cattolica. Contributi alla Storia della Chiesa di Venezia 4. Venice: Edizioni Studium Cattolico Veneziano, 1990.
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  599. The fourth of ten volumes of the Chiesa di Venezia published 1986 to 1997, all collections of essays covering the history of the Venetian church from its origins through the 20th century; the first place to look for the institutional, social, and intellectual dimensions of the Christian experience in Venice.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Betto, Bianca, Giorgio Cracco, and Giorgio Fedalto, eds. La chiesa di Venezia tra Medioevo ed età moderna. Contributi alla Storia della Chiesa di Venezia 3. Venice: Edizioni Studium Cattolico Veneziano, 1989.
  602. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  603. The third of ten volumes of the Chiesa di Venezia published 1986 to 1997, all collections of essays covering the history of the Venetian church from its origins through the 20th century; the first place to look for the institutional, social, and intellectual dimensions of the Christian experience in Venice.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Betto, Bianca, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Antonio Niero, eds. La chiesa di Venezia nel Seicento. Contributi alla Storia della Chiesa di Venezia 5. Venice: Edizioni Studium Cattolico Veneziano, 1992.
  606. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  607. The fifth of ten volumes of the Chiesa di Venezia published 1986 to 1997, all collections of essays covering the history of the Venetian church from its origins through the 20th century; the first place to look for the institutional, social, and intellectual dimensions of the Christian experience in Venice.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Sarpi: The Confrontation with Rome
  610.  
  611. The distinctive posture of Venice vis-à-vis the Church of Rome is summed up in the lifework of the Servite friar Paolo Sarpi (b. 1552–d. 1623), author of the massive History of the Council of Trent (1619), which influenced Protestant theologians and later Enlightenment skeptics. His career is considered in Cozzi 1978 and Wootton 1983.
  612.  
  613. Cozzi, Gaetano. Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e l’Europa. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi 356. Turin, Italy: G. Einaudi, 1978.
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  615. Consisting of three essays by Cozzi written from the 1950s through the 1970s, capsulates his understanding of Sarpi as a historian and polemicist with a European vision, related to the group of the giovani (the “young”), political reformers who resisted papal power.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Wootton, David. Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
  618. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558672Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  619. Argues that Sarpi was not merely a critic of the church but a covert atheist who valued allegiance to the secular state over that to religion, whose work thus serves as a critical moment of transition from Renaissance to Enlightenment outlook.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Source
  622.  
  623. The edition of Sarpi’s works frames the confrontation between the Church of Venice and the Church of Rome. Selections from that work appear in Sarpi 1969.
  624.  
  625. Sarpi, Paolo. Opere. Edited by Gaetano Cozzi and Luisa Cozzi. Storici, Politici e Moralisti del Seicento 1. Milan and Naples, Italy: R. Ricciardi, 1969.
  626. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  627. Selection and edition of works of Paolo Sarpi, with an analytical apparatus that itself serves as a study of this critical figure best known for his defense of Venetian policy during the 1606–1607 Interdict crisis.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Religious Dissent, Reform, and Persecution
  630.  
  631. Even before the Reformation, prominent Venetian clerics led reform efforts, as did several of the 15th-century humanists surveyed in King 2005, and their renowned 16th-century successors, Vincenzo Querini and Gasparo Contarini, whose efforts are profiled in Bowd 2002 and Gleason 1993. Launching the Roman Inquisition in 1543, however, the church chose the path of repression over that of evangelical reform. Venice retained control of its own Inquisition, which was vigilant but relatively mild, even as the city became the hub of heterodox thought and publication. Grendler 1977 and Barbierato 2012 explore the attempts of the Inquisition to control the Venetian press and the exchange of religious ideas, while Martin 1993, Martin 1989, Ambrosini 1999, and Seitz 2011 consider the repression of alleged heretics and witches.
  632.  
  633. Ambrosini, Federica. Storie di patrizi e di eresia nella Venezia del ’500. Milan: F. Angeli, 1999.
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  635. Reconstructs from archival records the behavior and beliefs of a few men and a very few women who inclined toward reform, and brushed close to heresy, in 16th-century Venice.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Barbierato, Federico. The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop: Inquisition, Forbidden Books, and Unbelief in Early Modern Venice. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.
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  639. Portraying Venice as a hotbed of heterodoxy, effectively displays the extent to which forbidden books and ideas circulated among non-elites, who gathered in shops and taverns for that purpose.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Bowd, Stephen D. Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2002.
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  643. Posits a “religious Renaissance” in Italy: an evangelical reform movement in which several Venetian figures participated importantly; next to Gasparo Contarini, the most notable was Vincenzo Querini, who advocated a return to church discipline under papal leadership.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Gleason, Elisabeth G. Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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  647. Definitive biography of the leading Venetian reformer and the one Italian most likely to succeed, although he did not in the end do so, in achieving reunion with the Protestant churches and promoting a pre-Tridentine reformation of the Catholic Church.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
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  651. Shows how the Venetian state cooperated with papal mandates to control the publication and circulation of forbidden religious literature through the 1580s, while reversing policy from the 1590s in part to protect the interests of the publishing houses. The trade in heterodox books was never completely stopped.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. King, Margaret L. “Umanesimo cristiano nella Venezia del Quattrocento.” In Humanism, Venice, and Women: Essays on the Italian Renaissance. By Margaret L. King, 15–54. Collected Studies CS802. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
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  655. Shows how Christian commitment infused the distinctive humanist culture of Venice, where humanists pioneered reform efforts as conscientious clerics, devoutly pious laymen, and authors of Christian devotional, hagiographic, and theological works.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Martin, Ruth. Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1650. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1989.
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  659. Exploring the fate of the witch in Venice, finds that the Inquisition there (a state agency) exerted itself scarcely at all to investigate maleficia or demonic sabbaths, although it did concern itself with illicit magic, necromancy, and divination, which prosecutions resulted in generally mild punishment.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Martin, John J. Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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  663. Looking at 676 cases of examination for heresy between the 1540s and 1580s, the author uncovers the extent of heterodoxy in Venice, which was generally of native, evangelical origin, was centered especially in artisan circles, and in general was only mildly punished.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Seitz, Jonathan. Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  666. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511894886Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  667. Confirming Ruth Martin’s earlier work (Martin 1989), shows that while beliefs in natural magic were widespread in Venice, prosecutions for maleficio, or malevolent witch practice, were few, largely because of the high standard for the evidence required to convict.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Religion and Gender
  670.  
  671. The high tide of women’s participation in religious life in Italy was reached in the 13th through early 17th centuries, when female saints and beate (holy women) rose in numbers and in the estimation of contemporaries, even as they engaged in extraordinary ascetic practices and extreme forms of mystical experience. At the same time, the conventualization of women increased to a zenith, in tune with the economic strategies of elite households that required the exclusion of daughters from inheritance. Schutte 2001 explores the phenomenon of women claiming sanctity on the basis of their religious experience, while Sperling 1999 examines the conventualization of women, and Weaver 2006 looks at the case of the coerced nun Arcangela Tarabotti.
  672.  
  673. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
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  675. Examining sixteen cases of “faked holiness” brought to trial across more than a century, explores how the Counter-Reformation prosecution of those (mostly women) claiming experience of the holy, evidenced in their visions, self-starvation, and miracle working, unfolded in the skeptical climate of Venice.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Sperling, Jutta Gisela. Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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  679. Shows how the patrician strategy of the monachization of daughters led first to the domination of the convents by noblewomen with scant religious commitment, constituting a threat to conventual discipline, and second to the reproductive failure of the noble caste, which preserved patrimony at the cost of demographic survival.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Weaver, Elissa, ed. Arcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice. Ravenna, Italy: Longo, 2006.
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  683. Collection of twelve studies examining the experience of a coerced nun and prolific author, who resisted in her works not only the forced conventualization of “surplus” daughters but the institutions of Venetian society that engendered that practice.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Sources
  686.  
  687. Since the late 20th century, scholarly interest in writings by and about women has resulted in the publication of many new texts, among them those pertinent to the religious experience of Venetian women. Riccoboni 2000 publishes the chronicle of a Venetian convent written by a resident nun, while Caffarini 1984 offers the hagiography of a beata (holy woman), both written in the early 15th century. Ferrazzi 1996 is the trial testimony, constituting a form of autobiography, of another beata from the 17th century, and Tarabotti 2004 is the most important of the several works against the forced conventualization of women by an outspoken critic of that practice.
  688.  
  689. Caffarini, Tommaso. La santità imitabile: “Leggenda di Maria da Venezia” di Tommaso da Siena. Edited by Fernanda Sorelli. Venice: Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie, 1984.
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  691. Life of a Venetian woman, formerly married, who joined the penitent followers of the Dominicans, commended by author Caffarini (Tommaso da Siena) for her perfect humility and obedience. Presents c. 1400 a different type of holy woman from that prevailing in the era of the Counter-Reformation.
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Ferrazzi, Cecilia. Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint. Edited and translated by Anne Jacobson Schutte. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
  694. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226244488.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  695. Self-presentation of the experience of a would-be 17th-century saint, as recorded by officials, showing how an ordinary woman’s unconventional career, driven by religious commitment, led her into the hands of the Inquisition, ever suspicious of extreme forms of female spirituality.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Riccoboni, Bartolomea. Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395–1436. Edited and translated by Daniel E. Bornstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
  698. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226717906.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  699. Remarkable chronicle written by a member of the community who records the impact on the nuns of events outside the walls—notably the Great Schism and Council of Constance—even as she tracks the lives and deaths of the women gathered within.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Tarabotti, Arcangela. Paternal Tyranny. Edited and translated by Letizia Panizza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
  702. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226789675.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  703. Most important of the polemical works of the coerced nun Arcangela Tarabotti, who squarely places the blame for the scandal of forced conventualization of “surplus” daughters on self-interested fathers—in effect, the collective Venetian elite—seeking to preserve wealth and maintain social standing.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Intellectual Culture
  706.  
  707. Intellectual culture remained traditional in Venice through the 14th century, with the chronicle or history the main form of literary product. An indigenous form of humanism developed from the 1390s, by the 1500s diverging into two main alternate streams: political and historical writing and literary works (poetry, drama, prose). All three cultural activities were boosted by the presence of a vital printing and publishing industry and were supported by public and private schools and the nearby University of Padua.
  708.  
  709. Humanism
  710.  
  711. Humanism has generally been considered through the prism of Florence, and especially its civic humanism. But Venice developed a rich humanist tradition of a different sort: directed by patrician political, legal, and philosophical interests; conservative in religious outlook; influenced by the Greek tradition and contacts; more concerned with the consolidation of Venetian culture than with the celebration of the individual. King 1986 offers a comprehensive study of Venetian humanism in cultural context, while, among Vittore Branca’s many essays on this topic, those gathered in Branca 1998 focus on the particular figure of Ermolao Barbaro the Younger as epitome of a distinctive Venetian humanism. Benzoni 2002 collects late-20th-century essays on the Greek dimension of Venetian humanism; Kallendorf 1999 examines Venetian editions of Virgil; Ferrari 1996; Giannetto 1985 and Labalme 1969 offer studies of individual humanists; and Cox 2003 provides a close look at a central humanist controversy over the nature of rhetoric.
  712.  
  713. Benzoni, Gino, ed. L’eredità greca e l’ellenismo veneziano. Papers presented at a conference held in 1998 in Venice. Florence: Olschki, 2002.
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  715. Collected conference papers on political, economic, but especially cultural relations of Venice with Byzantium and Greek culture. Includes studies of Bessarion, Manuzio, and Erasmus, thus updating the earlier work of Deno Geanakoplos and others.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Branca, Vittore. La sapienza civile: Studi sull’Umanesimo a Venezia. Florence: Olschki, 1998.
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  719. Collection of Branca’s essays centered on Ermolao Barbaro the Younger and his circle, which characterize Venetian humanism as concerned with “wisdom” or “knowledge,” as opposed to the Florentine concern with human dignitas (dignity or worth). Argues that Venetian humanism influenced authors abroad, not only in Italy but also in France and Spain.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Cox, Virginia. “Rhetoric and Humanism in Quattrocento Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 56.3 (2003): 652–694.
  722. DOI: 10.2307/1261610Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  723. Examines the humanist discussions about the nature of rhetoric that took place in the last decades of the 15th century.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Ferrari, Giovanna. L’esperienza del passato: Alessandro Benedetti filologo e medico umanista. Florence: Olschki, 1996.
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  727. Considers the career of Benedetti, both a physician and a humanist, pursuits not uncommonly combined in Venice, finding his interest in Greek studies reflected in his influential pre-Vesalian work on anatomy, as his historical skills were expressed in his contemporaneous account of the French invasion of Italy.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Giannetto, Nella. Bernardo Bembo, umanista e politico veneziano. Florence: Olschki, 1985.
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  731. Exhaustive study of the Venetian statesman and humanist Bernardo Bembo, father of the more famous literary figure Pietro, especially interesting for Bernardo’s contacts with the Ficinian circle in Florence. Appendix publishes relevant texts.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. Kallendorf, Craig. Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  735. Examines nearly two hundred editions of Virgil (in Latin and Italian translation) produced in Venice between 1470 and 1600, focusing on commentaries and other paratextual material to understand how and why the text was read.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. King, Margaret L. Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
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  739. Identifies three generations of humanists active in Venice from 1400 to 1490, who employed the intellectual tools of humanism in the service of traditional Venetian norms. Includes extensive bio-bibliographical data on the ninety-two figures, the majority of whom were patricians.
  740. Find this resource:
  741. Labalme, Patricia H. Bernardo Giustiniani: A Venetian of the Quattrocento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969.
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  743. Definitive study of the life and works of Bernardo Giustiniani, patrician humanist and statesman and author of an important work on the origin and history of Venice. Especially valuable because Giustiniani’s works do not yet have modern editions.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Sources
  746.  
  747. While many works by Venetian humanists remain in manuscript or early editions, the decades since the mid-20th century have seen the publication of important texts, including in Latin the works and letters of Ermolao Barbaro the Younger (Barbaro 1943, Barbaro 1969), the letters of his uncle Francesco Barbaro (Barbaro 1991–1999), and key works of Lauro Quirini (Quirini 1977), as well as in two different editions—Fedele 2000 (in English) and Fedele 2010 (in Italian)—the works of the woman humanist Cassandra Fedele.
  748.  
  749. Barbaro, Ermolao, the Younger. Epistolae, orationes et carmina. Edited by Vittore Branca. Florence: Bibliopolis, 1943.
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  751. Important critical edition of Barbaro’s works, the letters documenting the author’s bridging between the humanistic and Aristotelian worlds in correspondence especially with Nicoletto Vernia, Elia del Medigo, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Barbaro, Ermolao, the Younger. De coelibatu, De officio legati. Edited by Vittore Branca. Florence: Olschki, 1969.
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  755. Completes Branca’s edition of Barbaro’s work, following the earlier publication of the humanist’s letters and orations (Barbaro 1943). On Celibacy defends the choice not to marry for the sake of a secular intellectual life. On the Legate reflects the Venetian experience in inventing modern diplomacy.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Barbaro, Francesco. Epistolario. 2 vols. Edited by Claudio Griggio. Florence: Olschki, 1991–1999.
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  759. Invaluable, up-to-date critical edition of the Barbaro correspondence. The first volume (1991) provides a census and description of the numerous manuscripts in which Barbaro’s letters (525 by him, plus 265 to him, totaling 790—a very large corpus for the era) appear. The second (1999) prints the letters themselves.
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Fedele, Cassandra. Letters and Orations. Edited and translated by Diana M. Robin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
  762. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226239330.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  763. Translation of the works, with full biographical introduction, of one of the four major women humanists of the Italian Renaissance (the others being Isotta Nogarola, Laura Cereta, and Olimpia Morata), and the only Venetian among them.
  764. Find this resource:
  765. Fedele, Cassandra. Orazioni ed epistole. Edited and translated by Antonino Fedele. Soggetti Rivelati 32. Venice and Padua, Italy: Il Poligrafo, 2010.
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  767. The Venetian star among the Italian women humanists, Cassandra Fedele receives here her first modern translation in her native language, in a superb bilingual edition with facing original Latin text and prefaced by a comprehensive analysis of her works, superseding earlier studies.
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Quirini, Lauro. Lauro Quirini umanista: Studi e testi. Edited by Konrad Krautter, P. O. Kristeller, Agostino Pertusi, Giorgio Revegnani, Helmut Roob, and Carlo Seno. Civiltà Veneziana: Saggi 23. Florence: Olschki, 1977.
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  771. Collection of the works of Quirini, a humanist important not only for his career in Venice and Padua but also for his later years in Crete, where he witnessed the advance of the Ottoman Turks. Invaluable also for its analytical apparatus, which places this complex figure in historical context.
  772. Find this resource:
  773. Political Thought, Historiography, and Cartography
  774.  
  775. Political and historical writing and cartographical investigation were natural elements of the intellectual culture of a city enjoying political and commercial dominance. Together Pertusi 1970, studying the tradition of Venetian historical writing from the 13th to 16th centuries, and Bezoni and Zanato 1982, studying that of the 16th and 17th centuries, offer a complete overview. Contrasting Venice and Florence, Bouwsma 1968 likens the Venetian tradition of political and historical thought to that of Florentine civic humanism, while Silvano 1993 draws a clear distinction between the republican traditions of the two cities. Falchetta 2006 provides a comprehensive study of Mauro Lapi’s world map of 1450, a prelude to modern exploration and cartography. For published histories and chronicles, see also Primary Sources.
  776.  
  777. Benzoni, Gino, and Tiziano Zanato, eds. Storici e politici veneti del Cinquecento e del Seicento. 2 vols. Milan and Naples, Italy: R. Ricciardi, 1982.
  778. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  779. The first volume reviews the political and historical writing of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the second presents texts with analytical introductions.
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Bouwsma, William James. Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
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  783. Explores the political and historical writings of the 16th century to demonstrate that Venetian thought had embraced a secular ideology of republican liberty and rejected traditional cultural values in advance of the crisis of 1606–1607. Scholars have been critical, preferring a more complicated analysis. Reprinted 1984.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Falchetta, Piero. Fra Mauro’s World Map: With a Commentary and Translations of the Inscriptions. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006.
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  787. Definitive and monumental study of the mappamondo (“world map”) of Mauro Lapi, the Camaldolese who produced around 1450 what may be considered the last medieval instance or the first great map of the age of exploration, a globe constructed of parchment 6 feet 4 inches in diameter.
  788. Find this resource:
  789. Pertusi, Agostino, ed. La storiografia veneziana fino al secolo XVI: Aspetti e problemi. Florence: Olschki, 1970.
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  791. Collection of conference papers by experts, which in the sum trace the historical writing about Venice from the first major 13th-century chronicles to the work of Marino Sanuto. Not yet superseded.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Silvano, Giovanni. La “Republica de’ Viniziani”: Ricerche sul repubblicanesimo veneziano in età moderna. Florence: Olschki, 1993.
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  795. Studies the course of “republican” thinking expressed in major political and historical treatises of 16th-century Venice, opposing it to the Florentine republicanism that culminated in the work of Machiavelli and his contemporaries.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Literature and Literary Circles
  798.  
  799. Little imaginative literature was produced in Venice before 1500, but that endeavor took off powerfully soon afterwards, linked to the activity of the publishing industry, the presence of heterodox currents of thought, and the burgeoning of salons that hosted a socially diverse and intellectually daring set of guests. Logan 1972 provides an overview of this literary setting. Focusing on the intellectuals drawn to the Venetian publishing houses, Grendler 1969 presents three of these freethinking authors, while Cairns 1985 profiles the most notorious among them, Pietro Aretino, and Terpening 1997 profiles the more staid yet prolific Ludovico Dolce. Carroll 1990 introduces the Paduan playwright Il Ruzante, active in Venetian patrician circles, while Rosenthal 1992 provides a definitive biography of the courtesan poet Veronica Franco, and Schneider 2007 is an analysis of the work of the Petrarchist poet Gaspara Stampa. Just prior to 1500, this outburst of Venetian literary effort was heralded by a bizarre illustrated romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Dream Vision of Polyphilus, 1499), of which Casella and Pozzi 1959 provides a comprehensive study.
  800.  
  801. Cairns, Christopher. Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice: Researches on Aretino and His Circle in Venice, 1527–1556. Florence: Olschki, 1985.
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  803. Reconstructs the circle of the greatest of the poligrafi—the provocative freelance writers who flourished in early-16th-century Venice, profiling Aretino’s relations with such greats as Erasmus, Bembo, Contarini, and Titian, as well as with wealthy patrician salon hosts and lesser hack writers.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Carroll, Linda L. Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Boston: Twayne, 1990.
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  807. Profiles this important Paduan writer, actor, and producer of revolutionary satirical drama written from the perspective of the peasant or servant and popular among elite audiences in early-16th-century Venice.
  808. Find this resource:
  809. Casella, Maria Teresa, and Giovanni Pozzi. Francesco Colonna: Biografia e opere. 2 vols. Padua, Italy: Editrice Antenore, 1959.
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  811. Definitive study of the author and intellectual context of the Dominican friar Francesco Colonna’s unique Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Dream Vision of Polyphilus, 1499), a combination of medieval dream literature and romance with antiquarian furnishings, reflective of Venetian religious and humanist culture at the end of the 15th century.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Grendler, Paul F. Critics of the Italian World, 1530–1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco, and Ortensio Lando. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
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  815. Studies three authors from the set of freelance writers—the poligrafi, or “writers of many things”—who circled about the Venetian publishing houses and published vernacular works critical of contemporaneous social, religious and intellectual values, representing a counter-trend to the idealism and conformity of contemporaneous humanism.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Logan, Oliver. Culture and Society in Venice, 1470–1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage. New York: Scribner’s, 1972.
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  819. After a tour of Venetian environs and society, describes main currents and figures of the intellectual, literary, artistic, and musical culture of Venice, principally from 1490 to the early 17th century. A still-useful overview.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
  822. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226027494.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  823. Definitive study of Franco, identifying her as a type of the elite or “honest” courtesan who flourished in sparkling patrician circles because of her intelligence and unmovable sense of self. Basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998), directed by Marshall Herskovitz.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Schneider, Ulrike. Der weibliche Petrarkismus im Cinquecento: Transformationen des lyrischen Diskurses bei Vittoria Colonna und Gaspara Stampa. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007.
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  827. Studies female Petrarchists of the 16th century, including the great Venetian poet Stampa, systematically establishing her relationship to the Petrarchan lyric tradition.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Terpening, Ronnie H. Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
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  831. Profiles one of the major poligrafi (freelance writers for the Venetian press), reviewing the several genres of his work, including history, poetry, and translation, and underscoring his importance as a cultural transmitter, serving the growing audience of readers in mid-16th-century Venice.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Sources
  834.  
  835. Works of three of the most original literary figures of 16th-century Venice are now available in translation: those of the poligrafo Pietro Aretino (Aretino 2005), the courtesan Veronica Franco (Franco 1998), and the musician Gaspara Stampa (Stampa 2010).
  836.  
  837. Aretino, Pietro. Dialogues. Edited and translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
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  839. Best available translation of Aretino’s satiric and pornographic works, often seen as typifying the freedom of Venetian intellectual life in the first half of the 16th century before its silencing by censorship and the Inquisition.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. Franco, Veronica. Poems and Selected Letters. Edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
  842. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259857.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  843. Companion to the editor Rosenthal’s biography of Franco, presents in a bilingual edition all the poems (Italian and English on facing pages) and a selection of her letters, particularly interesting for their revelations of Franco’s protofeminist stance.
  844. Find this resource:
  845. Stampa, Gaspara. The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the Rime, a Bilingual Edition. Edited by Troy Tower and Jane Tylus. Translated and introduced by Jane Tylus. Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
  846. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226770734.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847. Returns to the authoritative 1554 edition to reconstruct the complete works of this exquisite poet, presented in a bilingual edition (Italian and English on facing pages).
  848. Find this resource:
  849. Printing, the Book, and Communication
  850.  
  851. Venice quickly emerged as one of the foremost printing centers of Italy and Europe, largely owing to the entrepreneurship and technical skills of Nicholas Jenson and Aldo Manuzio, profiled in Lowry 1991 and Lowry 1979. Zorzi 1987 traces the history of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (the National Library of Saint Mark) from its origins in the intended and effectual donations of Petrarch and Bessarion, while more-recent approaches in cultural studies are showcased in Cowan 2008, de Vivo 2007, Horodowch 2008, and Wilson 2005, which consider in different combinations the interrelations of print, oral communication, language, identity, and social networks. The collected essays in Pon and Kallendorf 2009, finally, address a range of fascinating topics related to the production, sale, circulation, and collection of Venetian books.
  852.  
  853. Cowan, Alexander. “Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice.” Journal of Early Modern History 12.3 (2008): 313–333.
  854. DOI: 10.1163/157006508X369901Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  855. Studies the important role of informal talk in cementing social and marital alliances in an early modern city.
  856. Find this resource:
  857. de Vivo, Filippo. Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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  859. Examines various networks of communication in late-16th- to 17th-century Venice, including communication in the council chambers, at the commercial center of the Rialto, and through public printed messages; relates these to the control of communication imposed in the 1606–1607 Interdict crisis and the consequent explosion of resistant expression.
  860. Find this resource:
  861. Horodowich, Elizabeth. Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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  863. Examines the language norms, found embedded in laws, trial testimony, judicial decisions, literary texts, and chronicles, that were imposed by the Venetian state as essential for the maintenance of political order.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Lowry, Martin. The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
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  867. Shows how the immigrant Aldo Manuzio established himself in Venice from 1494 through alliances with experienced entrepreneurs and patrician supporters and launched the most important printing project in Europe at that time: to publish the entire corpus of Greek and Latin books in readable and convenient octavo editions.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Lowry, Martin. Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Europe. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.
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  871. Turning to the generation before Aldus Manutius, studies the inauguration of the print industry in what would soon become the world’s most important printing center. Assisted by patrician patrons, Jenson, the preeminent figure in this story, produced 108 titles between 1470 and 1481.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Pon, Lisa, and Craig Kallendorf, eds. The Books of Venice: Il libro veneziano. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2009.
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  875. Twenty-one essays, most of which first saw the light at a 2007 conference, headed by Marino Zorzi’s introduction on Venetian libraries as the expression of “a singular civilization.” Among other matters, considers a Paduan book auction, Venetian incunabula in Bavaria, Greek liturgical texts, and studies of book printers, dealers, and collectors.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. Wilson, Bronwen. The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
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  879. Studies the visual print culture of late-16th-century Venice, principally maps, city views, illustrations of processions and costumes, and the like, which showed people to themselves amid an urban landscape and thus fostered a modern sense of identity.
  880. Find this resource:
  881. Zorzi, Marino. La libreria di San Marco: Libri, lettori, società nella Venezia dei dogi. Milan: Mondadori, 1987.
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  883. Comprehensive intellectual, artistic, and social history of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, formed around a collection of Greek books bequeathed to the Republic by the Byzantine refugee and humanist Cardinal Bessarion.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. Schooling
  886.  
  887. In northern Italy generally, a shift from monastery-based to urban-based education occurred over the 14th and 15th centuries. In Venice, especially, the need to train a large bureaucracy as well as patrician youths encouraged the formation both of public and private schools. Older students seeking university training journeyed to the nearby university at Padua, a distinct topic not included in this article. Ortalli 1996 presents a history of Venetian schools until the advent of humanism, while Bertanza and della Santa 1993 identifies some 850 teachers from the 14th and 15th centuries, Baldo 1977 identifies another 258 for the late 16th century, and Ross 1976 clarifies the origins of the city’s “public” schools. Paul Grendler stresses Venetian institutions in his larger study of schooling in Italy (Grendler 1989), carrying the story to the end of the 16th century, while Maschietto 2007 profiles a Venetian noblewoman whose advanced studies won her a doctoral degree from the University of Padua in 1678, making her the world’s first woman graduate.
  888.  
  889. Baldo, Vittorino. Alunni, maestri e scuole in Venezia alla fine del XVI secolo. Como, Italy: New Press, 1977.
  890. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  891. Looks at 258 Venetian teachers and school curricula around 1587.
  892. Find this resource:
  893. Bertanza, Enrico, and Giovanni della Santa. Maestri, scuole e scolari in Venezia fino al 1500. Edited by Gherardo Ortalli. Vicenza, Italy: Neri Pozza, 1993.
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  895. On the basis of an exhaustive archival search, identifies some 850 private teachers in Venice during the 14th and 15th centuries. Originally published in Venice in 1907, “a spese della Società” (i.e., di Storia Patria).
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
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  899. A comprehensive study of elementary and secondary schooling throughout Italy across a full three centuries, with attention to the institutional and social context as well as to curriculum and books, and especially strong on learning and literacy in Venice.
  900. Find this resource:
  901. Maschietto, Francesco Ludovico. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684): The First Woman in the World to Earn a University Degree. Edited by Catherine Marshall. Translated by Jan Vairo and William Crochetiere. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2007.
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  903. Definitive study of this protofeminist figure, who really did receive a philosophy degree from the University of Padua. Documents Cornaro Piscopia’s education at home, in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, from private tutors hired by a father seeking to exploit his daughter’s accomplishments in order to purge his own marred reputation. Original Italian publication is titled Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, 1646–1684: Prima donna laureata nel mondo (Padua, Italy: Antenore, 1978).
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Ortalli, Gherardo. Scuole, maestri e istruzione di base tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: Il caso veneziano. Bologna, Italy: Mulino, 1996.
  906. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  907. Largely on the basis of extensive published documents, constructs a history of Venetian schooling, almost entirely private, from the 13th through the mid-15th centuries, when the impact of humanist pedagogy was first felt.
  908. Find this resource:
  909. Ross, James Bruce. “Venetian Schools and Teachers, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century: A Survey and a Study of Giovanni Battista Egnazio.” Renaissance Quarterly 29.4 (1976): 521–566.
  910. DOI: 10.2307/2860032Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  911. Classic article surveys the schools functioning in Venice during the 15th and 16th centuries, distinguishing between the private and “public” schools, and reviewing the exemplary career of the teacher and editor Giovanni Battista Egnazio.
  912. Find this resource:
  913. The Arts
  914.  
  915. For many visitors, the draw of Venice is its splendor: its magnificent buildings with all their ornamentation, interior and exterior, which makes the whole city a museum—but especially the central Piazza San Marco, dominated by the Doge’s Palace and the basilica—and the museums themselves as lesser repositories. That splendid architectural and sculptural display is made up of accretions across the centuries, from the early Byzantine era, the later medieval Gothic, the classicizing Renaissance, and the magnificent baroque. Painting comes late, only in the 15th century, and the performing arts still later, with music the province of parish, confraternal, and conventual churches in the 16th century, and opera that of the public theater in the 17th century.
  916.  
  917. General
  918.  
  919. An introduction to the arts and artists of Renaissance Venice is best found in Huse and Wolters 1990, considering architecture, sculpture, and painting, and in the essays presented in Humfrey 2007, which surveys all the arts not only in Venice but in the surrounding Veneto. Brown 1996 explores Venice’s particular relation to the past, while Rosand 2001 shows how the Venetian state employed the arts to impose its message on viewers. Howard and Moretti 2009 studies the interplay in Venice between architecture and sound, while Luchs 2010 zeroes in on the portrayal and significance of mermaids in Venetian art.
  920.  
  921. Brown, Patricia Fortini. Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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  923. Alone among major Italian cities, Venice had no Roman past, and so, the author argues, the city created one, incorporating painted and sculpted images with references to Roman ruins and monuments and thus providing emblematic authority for the Venetian regime.
  924. Find this resource:
  925. Howard, Deborah, and Laura Moretti. Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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  927. Adding a new dimension to the recovery of the experience of past audiences is the consideration of the space within which sounds were heard. To recapture that experience, Howard and Moretti analyzed the performances of the choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, in eleven churches, reporting the results in this unusual volume.
  928. Find this resource:
  929. Humfrey, Peter, ed. Venice and the Veneto. Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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  931. Seven essays by renowned experts plus the editor’s introduction and epilogue place the arts in the context of state and society not only in Venice itself, but also in the principal cities of the terraferma dominion.
  932. Find this resource:
  933. Huse, Norbert, and Wolfgang Wolters. The Art of Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 1460–1590. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
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  935. Includes all the arts in a comprehensive narrative, organized by category and genre rather than by masters. Original German publication is titled Venedig, die Kunst der Renaissance (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986).
  936. Find this resource:
  937. Luchs, Alison. The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art. London: Harvey Miller, 2010.
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  939. Pursues “marine hybrids,” or mermaids, portrayed in forms inherited from ancient and medieval literature and art, adorning books, incorporated in tombs, overrunning churches, and making their presence felt even in the ducal palace and Piazza San Marco in the heart of Venice.
  940. Find this resource:
  941. Rosand, David. Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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  943. Shows how the “Venetian propaganda machine,” through the works of officially commissioned art, imposed on viewers a desired view of the Republic as stable, just, and eternal. Readable discussion based on a lecture series.
  944. Find this resource:
  945. Painting
  946.  
  947. Humfrey 1995 offers a general introduction to Venetian painting of the 15th and 16th centuries, while Brown 1988 highlights the importance of narrative painting in Venetian culture. Pointing to a departure from traditional and corporate values to a more individualistic, and less masculine, sensibility, are Goffen 1997, which considers Titian’s paintings of women, and Koos 2006, which analyzes the development of the “lyric” portraiture of Giorgione and Titian and their followers. The essays in Ilchman 2009 focus on three great masters and rivals of the 16th century, while Puglisi and Barcham 2011, an exhibition catalogue, traces the depiction of Christ as “man of sorrows” from Paolo Veneziano to Paolo Veronese.
  948.  
  949. Brown, Patricia Fortini. Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
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  951. Definitive study of narrative artist Carpaccio, identifying as distinctive to Venice the “eyewitness” role of the artist, whose documentation of events served as a form of visual evidence and supported the collective culture.
  952. Find this resource:
  953. Goffen, Rona. Titian’s Women. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
  954. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  955. Argues that Titian’s delectable female subjects were not gifts to the prurient but representations of autonomous and self-assured beings, setting them firmly within a contemporaneous social context of laws, custom, and costume.
  956. Find this resource:
  957. Humfrey, Peter. Painting in Renaissance Venice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
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  959. Concise overview from the takeover of Gothic by Renaissance style in the 15th century to Veronese, the last of the great 16th-century masters, in the 16th century.
  960. Find this resource:
  961. Ilchman, Frederick, ed. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice. Boston: MFA Publications, 2009.
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  963. Four essays, including two by the editors, explore comparatively the innovations of three masters whose careers overlapped for a period of forty years, during which time they imitated and competed with each other for recognition and profit.
  964. Find this resource:
  965. Koos, Marianne. Bildnisse des Begehrens: Das lyrische Männerporträt in der venezianischen Malerei des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts; Giorgione, Tizian und ihr Umkreis. Emsdetten, Germany: Edition Imorde, 2006.
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  967. Ambitious analysis of portraiture in 16th-century Venice, considering mainly visual but also literary portraits, from the perspective of a theoretical tradition reaching from Aristotle to Castiglione, and identifying its “lyric” and simultaneously effeminizing qualities.
  968. Find this resource:
  969. Puglisi, Catherine R., and William L. Barcham, eds. Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese; The Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art. New York: Museum of Biblical Art, 2011.
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  971. A small catalogue of an exceptionally important exhibition focused on the iconic image of the dead and crucified but still-living, redemptive Christ, as portrayed (mainly in painting) by a cycle of Venetian artists from, among others, Paolo Veneziano in the 14th century, Michele Giambono and Carlo Crivelli in the 15th century, and Tintoretto and Veronese in the 16th century.
  972. Find this resource:
  973. Source
  974.  
  975. As an accompaniment to the many studies of his painting, Puppi 2012 offers us a definitive edition of Titian’s correspondence, which notably amplifies the visual record.
  976.  
  977. Puppi, Lionello, ed. Tiziano: L’epistolario. Tizian e l’Europa 3. Florence: Alinari 24 Ore, 2012.
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  979. Provides a complete edition of Titian’s letters, amounting to 279 letters (including those addressed to him) dating from 1513 to 1576, supported by extensive critical notes (and supplemented by a critical essay by anglophone Titian expert Charles Hope) that aim explicitly to document Titian’s artistic activity and interactions with patrons and assistants.
  980. Find this resource:
  981. Architecture and Sculpture
  982.  
  983. Venice’s unique setting makes Venetian architecture a special case. For these buildings erected apparently on the surface of the waters, Byzantine and then Gothic style lingered into the late 15th century, when a classicizing style emerged slowly to culminate in the idealized classicism of Palladio. Howard 2002 introduces the viewer to the general history of Venetian architecture; Howard 2000, to the lesser-known imprint of Islamic forms on the Venetian cityscape. Goy 1992 tells the story of the building of one princely palace, and Cooper 2005 explains the great achievement of Palladio in blending new structural concepts with the setting and culture of Venice. Pincus 2000 follows the development of memorial tombs for the doges, as much architectural as sculptural monuments, which celebrate state and clan as much as individual rulers, while Tafuri 1989 considers architectural expressions of power in the urban setting. Turning from issues of state, finally, Martin 1998 identifies the classicizing portrait bust as a new sculptural statement of personal identity.
  984.  
  985. Cooper, Tracy Elizabeth. Palladio’s Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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  987. Definitive study of the dominant architect of 16th-century Venice, who, though foreign born, came most to represent a classical ideal in a city that had long clung to Gothic forms. Especially valuable reconstruction of the network of Palladio’s aristocratic patrons.
  988. Find this resource:
  989. Goy, Richard J. The House of Gold: Building a Palace in Medieval Venice. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  990. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  991. Unusual history of the construction in early-15th-century Venice of one extraordinary palace perched on the Grand Canal: the famous Ca d’oro, “house of gold,” so called because of its lavish decoration. Extensive records of the building process over twenty years (1421–1441) permit a close look at the process of managing the site, the workers, and the materials.
  992. Find this resource:
  993. Howard, Deborah. Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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  995. Shows how Venice acted as the “hinge” of Europe not only as a commercial center, but as the European city that most directly confronted Islam, a culture from which it borrowed visual patterns, incorporating them into the framework of a Western Christian society, most strikingly in its architectural forms.
  996. Find this resource:
  997. Howard, Deborah. The Architectural History of Venice. Rev. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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  999. Compact overview, tracing Venetian architecture from Byzantine origins to modern times and stressing the factors making for a distinctive tradition, including a lagoon setting, Eastern influences, patronage networks, and the building types dictated by the needs of noble clans and confraternities.
  1000. Find this resource:
  1001. Martin, Thomas. Alessandro Vittoria and the Portrait Bust in Renaissance Venice: Remodelling Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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  1003. Through the medium of the portrait bust, which the sculptor Vittoria brought to Venice from the humanistic precincts of Padua, shows how a classicizing genre appealed to patrician tastes and took hold in the 16th century.
  1004. Find this resource:
  1005. Pincus, Debra. The Tombs of the Doges of Venice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  1007. Examines the sculptural programs of early dogal tombs, showing that although personal memorialization was rare in Venice before 1500, the memorialization of the doges served a civic function: the ruler was elevated not as an individual personality but as an embodiment of Venetian greatness.
  1008. Find this resource:
  1009. Tafuri, Manfredo. Venice and the Renaissance. Translated by Jessica Levine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
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  1011. Viewing architecture as the visible expression of power relations, traces in 16th-century building programs the tensions between traditionalists and moderns more inclined to a humanist and Romanist agenda. Original Italian edition is titled Venezia e Il Rinascimento: Religione, Scienza, Architettura (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1985).
  1012. Find this resource:
  1013. Doge’s Palace and San Marco
  1014.  
  1015. At the heart of Venice politically and culturally, the Piazza San Marco was dominated by the two unique buildings of the Doge’s Palace, housing the council chambers of government, and the basilica, a physical expression of Venice’s conflation of church and state. The essays in Vio 2003 examine the multiple constituent elements of the basilica, which gave visual expression to the identity of church and state, while Jacoff 1993 gives close examination to the four prancing horses mounted above the main portal, noting their religious as well as political meaning. The political content of the visual program in the Doge’s Palace comes as no surprise but is well analyzed in Wolters 1983.
  1016.  
  1017. Jacoff, Michael. The Horses of San Marco and the Quadriga of the Lord. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
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  1019. Examines the history and significance of the four life-sized horses positioned above the main portal of the basilica San Marco. Prizes from Venice’s 1204 raid on Constantinople, they symbolized the Republic’s political triumph, but also its piety, the team of four horses recalling as well in Christian imagery the four Evangelists.
  1020. Find this resource:
  1021. Vio, Ettore, ed. St. Mark’s: The Art and Architecture of Church and State in Venice. Translated by Huw Evans. New York: Riverside, 2003.
  1022. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1023. Collection of twenty-eight studies by experts on all aspects of the arts concentrated in St. Mark’s basilica. Includes discussions of the mosaics and the treasury, the horses and the tetrarchs, and the portal and the tombs, constituting a full introduction to this important monument. Original Italian publication is titled Lo splendore di San Marco a Venezia (Rimini, Italy: Idea Libri, 2001).
  1024. Find this resource:
  1025. Wolters, Wolfgang. Der Bilderschmuck des Dogenpalastes: Untersuchungen zur Selbstdarstellung der Republik Venedig im 16. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden, Germany: Steiner, 1983.
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  1027. Examines the expansive paintings on the walls of the Doge’s Palace as communications of Venice’s political and triumphalist self-representation. Available in Italian translation as Storia e politica nei dipinti di Palazzo Ducale: Aspetti dell’autocelebrazione della Repubblica di Venezia nel Cinquecento, translated by Benedetta Heinemann Campana and edited by Maddalena Redolfi (Venice: Arsenale, 1987).
  1028. Find this resource:
  1029. Music and Performance
  1030.  
  1031. Venice itself was a kind of ongoing performance, the setting for many ritual events engaging large numbers of actors as well as spectators, ranging from the procession of the True Cross to the anarchy of Carnival. In this context, musical performance in the 16th century and opera in the 17th became integral to the city’s cultural life. Glixon 2003 presents the musical activity of the great Venetian confraternities, and Quaranta 1998 documents that activity across the whole range of ecclesiastical institutions that were the main public settings for musical performance. Glixon and Glixon 2006, Muir 2007, and Rosand 1991 show from different vantage points how opera, although born elsewhere, became established at Venice and densely intermeshed with the city’s cultural and commercial institutions, while Heller 2003 looks specifically at how representations of female characters in Venetian opera relate to contemporaneous social attitudes. Bernstein 2001, Feldman 1995, and Selfridge-Field 2007 explore the intersection of musical composition and performance with the print industry, intellectual and political norms, and premodern concepts of time, respectively.
  1032.  
  1033. Bernstein, Jane A. Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  1035. Studies the business of music printing, a subset of the Venetian print industry directed primarily toward an elite audience, showing the interrelations among commerce, literacy, and musical performance.
  1036. Find this resource:
  1037. Feldman, Martha. City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
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  1039. Shows how Ciceronian rhetorical norms, civic values of restraint and equilibrium, and principles of musical composition came together in the production of the madrigal, now set within an interdisciplinary network of values.
  1040. Find this resource:
  1041. Glixon, Jonathan E. Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1807. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  1042. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195134896.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1043. Definitive history of the musical activity, central to the cultural life of the city, of the six major and nearly three hundred minor Venetian confraternities from their origin until their suppression.
  1044. Find this resource:
  1045. Glixon, Beth L., and Jonathan E. Glixon. Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  1046. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195154160.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1047. Studies the operation of opera companies performing at four theaters, including the production of libretti and scores; the management of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists; the construction of scenery, machinery, and costumes; and the recruitment of consumers and patrons.
  1048. Find this resource:
  1049. Heller, Wendy. Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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  1051. Examines female characters as represented in opera, including historical and mythological figures such as Dido, Semiramis, and Messalina, whose self-expression and destiny reflected contemporaneous attitudes toward chastity, androgyny, and sexual passion in women.
  1052. Find this resource:
  1053. Muir, Edward. The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
  1054. DOI: 10.4159/9780674041264Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1055. Explains how the interaction of intellectual currents imported from Padua, noble patronage, and a climate of libertinism and license helped make Venice, rather than Florence (where the genre was invented), the center of opera in Italy and in Europe.
  1056. Find this resource:
  1057. Quaranta, Elena. Oltre San Marco: Organizzazione e prassi della musica nelle chiese di Venezia nel Rinascimento. Florence: Olschki, 1998.
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  1059. Comprehensive census of organization and financing of musical programs in some two hundred Venetian churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical institutions, including expenses for the hiring of musicians and singers. Large appendix of published documents.
  1060. Find this resource:
  1061. Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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  1063. Claiming primacy for Venice in the creation of the operatic “genre,” studies the evolution of the principal attributes of opera in the critical period of 1637 to 1678, considering the urban setting, the circle of librettists, and the commercial structures involved in its creation.
  1064. Find this resource:
  1065. Selfridge-Field, Eleanor. Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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  1067. Studies the intersection between concepts of time and musical performance, illuminating the multiple ways of measuring and reporting cultural events in a premodern city.
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