John Jeffries Martin, author of Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City and editor of The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad, is a professor of history at Trinity University. Dennis Romano, author of Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State and Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600, is a professor of history at Syracuse University.

A welcome and illuminating book. -- Thomas Kuehn Journal of Interdisciplinary History Succeeds both in reassessing outdated conceptions of life under the Venetian Republic and in proposing new fields of research... This book contributes substantially toward a more comprehensive, complex view of Venice... This is an exemplary collection of essays that provides a fresh look at five hundred years of Venetian social and political history. -- Christopher Carlsmith Sixteenth-Century Journal Provides an excellent survey of the state of current research on the city. -- Jonathan Walker Journal of European Studies Chronological width is matched by thematic wealth... The volume is likely to become a landmark in Venetian historiography. -- Filippo de Vivo The Historical Journal

• 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