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.
Contents: PrefaceList of ContributorsReconsidering Venice John Martin and Dennis Romano Part I. The Setting1 Toward an Ecological Understanding of the Myth of Venice Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan Part II. Politics and Culture2 The Serrata of the Great Council and Venetian Society, 1286-1323 Gerhard Rosch3 Hard Times and Ducal Radiance: Andrea Dandolo and the Construction of the Ruler in Fourteenth-Century Venice Debra Pincus4 Was There Republicanism in the Renaissance Republics? Venice after Agnadello Edward Muir5 Confronting New Realities: Venice and the Peace of Bologna, 1530 Elisabeth G. Gleason6 "A Plot Discover'd?"Myth, Legend, and the "Spanish"Conspiracy against Venice in 1618 Richard Mackenney7 Opera, Festivity, and Spectacle in "Revolutionary"Venice: Phantasms of Time and History Martha Feldman Part III. Society and Culture8 Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata Stanley Chojnacki9 Behind the Walls: The Material Culture of Venetian Elites Patricia Fortini Brown10 Elite Citizens James S. Grubb11 Veronese's High Altarpiece for San Sebastiano: A Patrician Commissionfor Counter Reformation Church Peter Humfrey12 Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication Peter Burke13 Toward a Social History of Women in Venice: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment Federica Ambrosini14 Slave Redemption in Venice, 1585-1797 Robert C. Davis Part IV. After the Fall15 The Creation of Venetian Historiography Claudio Povolo Index
