John Jeffries Martin (Editor), Dennis Romano (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.
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
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002
ISBN-13: 978-0801873089
