Venice Reconsidered

John Martin and Dennis Romano make a very persuasive and compelling argument for the radical shift in Venetian historiography, from the strands of myth and anti-myth in traditional scholarship to the contemporary image-more complex, more nuanced, and more flexible-developed by the other essays in this volume. -- Gene Brucker, University of California, Berkeley An exemplary collection of essays which taken together demonstrate not only how much our view of Venice has changed in the past twenty-five years but also how much the Venetians' representation of themselves changed over the half millennium of the Republic's history. -- Nicholas Davidson, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford This important and wide-ranging collection offers a variety of approaches to different aspects of Venetian history; the essays are substantial, based on extensive archival research, and well balanced; and they will prove essential reading for anyone interested in Venice for a long time to come. -- Daniela Hacke, University of Zurich A dramatic reassessment of Venetian history. -- Margaret F. Rosenthal, University of Southern California

Drawing on a variety of disciplines-history, art history, and musicology-these essays present innovative variants of the myth of Venice-that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories Venetians told about themselves.Venice Reconsidered offers a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchical, the scholars in this volume present a more fluid and complex interpretation of Venetian culture. Drawing on a variety of disciplines-history, art history, and musicology-these essays present innovative variants of the myth of Venice-that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories Venetians told about themselves.