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, Nonfiction

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

[John Gossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb collection of academic essays about Venetian history. Which is not to say all of the essays are superb, but the book contains very few clunkers. Furthermore, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, simultaneously working together to establish an overall thesis, and providing a variety of sometimes contradictory points of view that allow the reader to make up their own mind.

My primary takeaways from this book are that Venetian history is full of myths and countermyths, both those used by the Venetian Oligarchs to maintain their power, and those that later explained its failure and even later held it up as a kind of ideal, highly stable state. And yet, the details of this story, as usual, are much more complex and interesting than any of those stereotypes.

I found the chapters about the Venetian social hierarchy especially interesting. In the Introduction the editors point out:

it is useful to know that from the time of the Serrata to its fall to Napoleon five hundred years later the ruling class of the city—male nobles and their families—generally made up less than 4–5 percent of the population. Only adult noble males had the right to sit in the Great Council and to participate in the political life of the Republic. Next in prestige were the cittadini (citizens), a diverse group comprising some 5–8 percent of the population whose privileges granted them entry into the state bureaucracy (to act, for example, as secretaries in the Ducal Chancery) or special commercial privileges as merchants. Many cittadini were among the wealthiest and most influential members of Venetian society. Finally, at the base of this “hierarchy” were the artisans, shopkeepers, and workers, who accounted for the remaining 90 percent of the city’s inhabitants.

In Chapters Two and Three, the authors reappraise the idea of the Serrata of 1297, which limited the aristocracy to a small number of families, supposedly closing off all routes to power except the hereditary. In fact, Venice was long flexible in this regard, allowing exceptional citizens to rise into the aristocracy through merit, wealth, and alliances. In Chapter 8, Chojnacki goes further by showing how in the 16th century, the patricians tried to truly live up to the ideal of the Golden Book, and close off these routes in the face of an influx of "new men" by establishing strict rules on marriage. In Chapter 10, we learn that this was also extended to the citizen classes, who dominated Venice's professional civil service, especially the Chancery, which sometimes seemed to have as much power as the doge and the various aristocratic councils. Imagine what fears of a "deep state" would look like if applicants for the civil service had to show descent from three generations of bureaucrats. Of course, I can't do justice to these complexities, but I found these chapters fascinating and look forward to reading them again.



What Venice was not good at was allowing people from outside the city, like the nobles of their colonies in the Mediterranean or the Terraferma cities, to join the ruling elite. This contrasts with how nation-states like France and England were able to unify by incorporating local nobles. Chapters 4 and 5 especially consider these topics. In 1509, after the Battle of Agnadello, Venice lost all of its mainland territories. What is interesting is that one of the reasons they eventually regained these territories and were able to control them right up until Napoleon is that the farmers and citizens of these cities preferred distant rule from Venice to the rule of their local lords. First, Venice, a rich, heavily populated city, lacking land for agriculture, was the primary market for these farmers. Secondly, the Venetian court system provided protection to these people from the typical abuses of the local nobles. I was also reminded of this quote by Ignazio Silone in his novel "Fontamara" about Fascism:

“Every government always consists of thieves,” he argued. “But if a government consists of a single thief instead of five hundred, it’s better for the peasants, of course, because the appetite of a big thief, however big that may be, will be always be less than that of five hundred small and hungry thieves. …”

In this case, Venice was the (distant) big thief, as well as their best customer.

I could go on. In Chapter 13, Federica Ambrosini uses the study of wills to cast light on women's rights in Venice. Although Venice was extremely patriarchal and, in many ways, a typical conservative Catholic country, Ambrosini uncovered several interesting points. One, women were allowed to pass on property, and very commonly literate, capable of writing their own wills, in which their husbands were not allowed to meddle (illiterate women were more at the mercy of their male relatives). Women also had considerable power over their dowries. This combination allowed married women to pass on their wealth to their daughters, reasoning that their sons had far better opportunities to make it through life on their own labor. Sometimes, husbands, in their own will, begged their wives not to bankrupt their sons by demanding their dowries be passed down in this fashion.

Less successful (or at least less interesting to me) were Chapter 12, about Venice and information, which turned into an enumeration of books printed in Venice over the centuries, and Chapter 11 about a Veronese Altarpiece, which had some pretty pictures, but didn't seem to contribute to the overall theme. Surprisingly, I did enjoy Chapter 7 about the role of music and theater in preserving Venetian patriotic traditions after Napoleon ended its independence.

There are plenty of Level 1 books about Venice: popular histories and textbooks. I recently read Ackroyd's "Venice: Pure City," a Level 2 book, which dives deeper but requires a lot of background to appreciate. "Venice Reconsidered" is a Level 3 book, but surprisingly accessible and well-written. Highly recommended.

[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.