Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797

by John Jeffries Martin (Editor)

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.

Genres: History

560 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 2000

About the author

John Jeffries Martin, Chair of the Department of History, is a historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004). In addition, he is the editor or co-editor of several volumes: Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State (2002); The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (2002); Heresy, Culture and Religion in Early Modern Italy: Contexts and Contestations (2006); and The Renaissance World (2007) as well as some fifty articles and essays. He is currently completing the first volume of Europe's Providential Modernity, 1492-1792, a work that offers a new interpretation not only of Europe in the early modern period but a rethinking of modernity itself. Martin’s further research focuses on the history of torture in early modern Italy, a topic he is pursuing through a study of Francesco Casoni, a provincial intellectual, whose writings on evidence and the art of conjecture did much to undermine the need for the use of torture in the courts of Europe in the early modern period.

Martin has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, twice of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and has received support for his research from the American Philosophical Association, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America. He has lectured, as the Alphonse Dupront Chair, at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and, as Distinguished Visiting Scholar, at Victoria College, the University of Toronto. He also lectures frequently to broader publics, most recently through a series of presentations on early modern Europe through the Program in the Humanities and Human Values at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

With Richard Newhauser, Martin is editor of the series Vices & Virtues for Yale University Press. Martin teaches courses in Italian and European history. His most recent courses include a graduate seminar on the history of the early modern Mediterranean and an undergraduate seminar on the history of torture in the West. In the spring of 2013 he offered, together with Sara Galletti, a course entitled “Mapping Knowledge in the Renaissance: Raphael’s School of Athens,” a collaborative that investigated the epistemologies of various disciplines in Rome in the High Renaissance. The course was funded by a grant from the Humanities Writ Large initiative at Duke.

Before joining the history faculty at Duke in 2007, Martin taught at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he also served as Chair of the History Department (2004-2007). Martin grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia, attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard.

Reviews

[Vlad Zamfira · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone interested in learning more about the Venetian Republic regarding socio-economics, art ,aspects of governance, foreign policies especially with Spain post Cateau Cambresis and much more this is a good place to start. The bibliography is rich and diverse, the book is structured into 15 large essays with a comprehensive introduction from editors John Jeffries Martin and Denis Romano.