Recent Italian works on the Renaissance: perspectives on intellectual, political, and social history.

Lucia Bertolini, ed. De vera amicitia: I testi del primo Certame coronario. (Testi, Instituto di studi rinascimentali.) Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1993. xix + pp. L 80,000.

Gaetano Cozzi, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello. La Repubblica di Venezia nell'eta moderna: dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica. (Storia d'Italia, 12.) Turin: UTET, 1992. xviii + 672 pp.

Elizabeth Cropper, Giovanna Perini, and Francesco Solinas, eds. Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII. Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence 1990. (Villa Spelman Colloquia, 3.) Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1992. Distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press. illus. + 406 pp.

Franco Frenceschi. Oltre il "Tumulto": I lavoratori fiorentini dell'arte della Lana fra Tre e Quattrocento. (Biblioteca di Storia Toscana Moderna e Contemporanea: Studi e documenti, 38.) Florence: Olschki, 1993. vii + 375 pp.

Guglielmo da Pastrengo. De viris illustribus et de originibus. Ed. Guglielmo Bottari. (Ente Nazionale Francesco Petrarca, Studi sul Petrarca, 21.) Padua: Antenore, 1991. 425 pp.

Guidubaldo Guidi. Lotte, pensiero e istituzioni politiche nella Repubblica fiorentina dal 1494 al 1512. Vol. I: Tra politica e diritto pubblico; vol. II: Gli istituti sovrani e di governo, vol. III. Finanze, tributi e dominio. (Bilioteca Storica Toscana, 28.) Florence: Olschki, 1992. 1400 pp. L 160,000.

Giuseppe Olmi. L'inventario del mondo: Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima eta moderna. (Annali dell'Istituto storico italogermanico in Trento, Monografia 17.) Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992. 457 pp. L 50,000.

Antonino Poppi. Cremonini, Galilei e gli inquisitori del Santo a Padova. Padua. Centro Studi Antoniani, 1993. 128 pp.

Adriano Prosperi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds. Il Nuovo Mondo nella conscienza italiana e tedesca del Cinquecento. (Annali dell'istituto storico italogermanico in Trento, Quaderno 33.) Bologna. Il Mulino, 1992, 419 pp. L 46,000.

I. New Categories, New Worlds

In 1507 the German humanist Martin Waldseemuller published the first edition of his Cosmographiae introductio. Like other cartographers of his day, Waldseemuller confronted fundamental discrepancies between classical cosmographies and the explosion of geographical knowledge in the early sixteenth centur - the question, for example, of whether or not Columbus had discovered a previously unknown continent. Although Waldseemuller would equivocate on this matter in a subsequent edition, in 1507 he presented his readers with a planisphere on which he baptized the newly-found continent "America" after Amerigo Vespucci's suggestion that Columbus had found not the Indies but a mundus novus - a New World.

Waldseemuller's effort to make sense of the place of the New World in relation to the Old was but one aspect of the profound transformations in European intellectual life in the Renaissance. For not only did Europe colonize the Americas, the newly discovered lands also transformed European thought as reports from conquistadors, explorers, missionaries, and settlers reached an increasingly curious public. As might be expected, the new knowledge was absorbed in complex ways, since the earlier models of their world (paradigms derived from both classical and Christian traditions) also determined how Europeans responded to the shifts in perspective brought about by the voyages of discovery. Both Catholics and Protestants, for example, found it difficult to conceptualize the inhabitants of the New World in other than polar terms: los Indios were either noble savages or barbarians; either innocents waiting for baptism or pagans under the influence of the Devil. Accordingly, European representations of the New World were anything but neutral. Indeed, the recent quincentennial discussions of Columbus and the often acrimonious debates about his political and cultural role make it plain that, five hundred years after his first crossing to the New World, Europeans and Americans alike still struggling with the question of the significance and the meaning of the voyages.(1)

It is refreshing, therefore, to encounter a book such as Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca del Cinquecento. To some degree, this volume (a thoughtfully conceived collection of essays edited by Adriano Prosperi and Wolfgang Reinhard) owes its success to its focus on European regions (Italy and Germany) that were not directly involved in the Conquest. As a result, the reader will find little here on the economic and political significance of the voyages of discovery; the essays rather emphasize developments in cartography, geography, anthropology, ethics, astronomy, and natural history. Moreover, each individual contribution addresses aspects of the modalities by which Europeans selected, interpreted, represented, and publicized the information they received from the world Columbus found.

To be sure, humanists played an important role in the assimilation of the new knowledge, as Corrado Vivanti makes plain in his well-informed essay "Gli umanisti e le scoperte geografiche." Yet in an age of exploration and merchant venturers that was also a period increasingly shaped by printing and experimentation in the use of the vernacular, other groups played even more important roles in the diffusion of knowledge about the Americas. Wolfgang Neuber explores the narrative tradition in Germany, though his piece is nicely supplemented by Renate Pieper's study of the so-called Fuggerzeitungen, "avvisi" or merchants, reports from the late sixteenth century that were filled with specific, highly accurate information about economic activity between the New World and the Old. We should not, however, assume that the relative accuracy of these reports was the norm, as Massimo Donattini shows in his quantitative analysis of texts published in Italian on this subject in the period 1493-1560. In fact, Italian readers, much like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, paid far less attention to the Americas than one might expect. Not surprisingly, given the political situation in the Mediterranean, books on the Middle East and Turkey predominated; indeed, when books on America were published, they often provided the most exaggerated accounts, though by the end of the period Giovanni Battista Ramusio's Navigationi et viaggi had begun to give a more balanced view. The volume's articles also explore the ways in which the reports led to transformations in geographic knowledge (Marica Milanesi, "Arsarot o Anian? Identita e separazione tra Asia e Nuovo Mondo nella cartografia del Cinquecento") to new understandings of anthropology (Hans-Joachim Konig, "Pluralita di culture o modello europeo"; L'America e gli Indios nelle prime testimonianze scritte tedesche"; Carla Forti, "La |guerra giusta' nel Nuovo Mondo: ricezione italiana del dibattito spagnolo"; and Girolamo Imbruglia, "Ideali di civilizzazione' la Compagnia di Gesu e le missioni"); as well as to new scientific insights and understandings (Helmuth Grossing, Giovanni Keplero e la scoperta di nuovi mondi" and Giuseppe Olmi, "Magnus campus": i naturalisti italiani di fronte all'America nel secolo XVI")

The impact of the discoveries underway in the New World, however, was but one stimulus to the changes underway in the organization of knowledge in the Old, as Giuseppe Olmi demonstrates in his L'inventario del mondo: catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima eta moderna. Olmi, whose contribution to Prosperi's and Reinhard's volume is reprinted as one of his chapters here, provides a detailed history of collecting, princely and scientific, in Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The explosion of knowledge brought about as a result both of the discovery of new worlds and of the rediscovery of antiquity made this a time, Olmi argues, in which intellectuals and artists as well as academicians and princes were animated by "the most intense desires" to achieve intellectual mastery over nature, to take possession of their world.(9)

Olmi devotes the first part of this study of collezionismo to the role of images in this early modern effort to observe and catalogue the natural world. He focuses in particular on the work of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), whose drawings were defined both by a desire to record the natural world as accurately as possible and by a tendency to moralize on the basis of what he took to be the symbolic significance of various flora and fauna. But Olmi also explores shifting principles of collecting. In the sixteenth and early seven-teenth centuries, collectors were drawn to the unusual and the exotic; and their museums (Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosities) were above all statements of prestige. By the later seventeenth century the emphasis (responding in part to the influence of Francis Bacon) had shifted to efforts to create grander museums, with objects included systematically and in accordance with their value for scientific knowledge. In Italy the Accademia dei Lincei under the leadership of Federico Cesi (1585-1630) played an important role in this transformation. Cesi placed great emphasis not only on collecting but also on classification, collaboration, research, and publication. Thus a full range of underlying motives for collecting emerges - from a fascination, as in the case of Aldrovandi, with the symbolic significance of the natural world, to the desire for prestige of the often princely and private Wunderkammern of the period, to the value Cesi placed on the public and political utility of science.

A similar set of themes emerges in Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, Giovanna Perini, and Francesco Solinas. Taking Foucault's suggestion of a defining "epistemic shift" between the Renaissance and the Classical Age as its starting point, this anthology, as Cropper observes in the introduction, offers a series of case studies on the culture of documentation (the ways in which scientists, archaeologists, artists, and members of academies in Rome and Florence sought to depict the worlds of antiquities, of the arts, and of nature in Italy in the age of the Baroque). Following Louis Marin's contribution, "Mimesis et description: ou de la curiosite a la methode de l'age de Montaigne a celui de Descartes," which deepens some of the theoretical issues earlier raised by Cropper, the volume covers a broad range of topics, from the prehistory of Egyptology in the early modern period thelen Whitehouse, "Towards a Kind of Egyptology: The Graphic Documentation of Ancient Egypt, 1587-1666") to the changing character of botanical drawings in the early modern period (David Freedberg, "Ferrari on the Classification of Oranges and Lemons"). Yet the contributions on Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657) - greatest taxonomist and one of the most brilliant encyclopedists of his age - are the most successful in providing evidence for a shift in Italian culture from predominantly aesthetic and narrative presentations to predominantly taxonomic and scientific representations of the natural world (Ingo Herklotz, "Das Museo Cartaceo des Cassiano dal Pozzo und seine Stellung in der antiquarischen Wissenschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts" and Henrietta McBurney, "Cassiano dal Pozzo as Scientific Commentator. Ornithological Texts, and Images of Birds from the Museo Cartaceo").(2)

Finally, Marc Fumaroli's "Reflexions apres une rencontre: L'Italie tridentine: une civilisation de l'Otium" constitutes an important attempt to offer something of a synthesis. Fumaroli suggests that scholars are only now in a position to appreciate baroque Italy on its own terms - as a culture of otium. In a Europe elsewhere torn by wars and other rivalries, he suggests, "Italy gradually became ... what Hellenistic Egypt had been for the Roman Empire: a Museum, a Library, an Archaeological Park."(398) Fumaroli's essay makes it plain that earlier interpretations of Italian culture in this period as backward are no longer tenable. As he observes, such interpretations were themselves determined by the dubious use of northern European culture and science as the yardstick against which all European development was to be measured. But despite the effort to link cultural and political history, Fumaroli's vision of Italy as a kind of museum remains idealist. He provides little sense of the ways in which the intellectual currents and values of the period either reflected or shaped the political, social, and economic histories of the Italian principalities in the early modern era.

The remaining essay in this volume are Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, "L'illustrazione teatrale e il significato dei documenti figurativi, per la storia dello spettacolo"; Bert W. Meijer, "Disegno dal vero o meno, e l'illustazione scientifica"; Daniela Lamberini, "Tradizione tecnica e |plagio' nei disegni della machinatio vitruviana di matrice fiorentina"; Giovanna Perini, "Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di communicazione, a documento, a cimelio"; Giovanni Morello, "I rapporti tra Alessandro VII e Gian Lorenzo Bernini negli autografi del Papa (con disegni, "Le lettere degli Sebastian Schutze, "Pittura parlante e poesia taciturna - il ritorno di Giovan Battista Marino a Napoli, il suo concetto di imitazione e una mirabile interpretazione pittorica"; Francesco Solinas, "Portare Roma a Parigi: Mecenati, artisti ed eruditi nella migrazione culturale"; Evelina Borea, "Giovan Pietro Bellori e la |comodita delle stampe'"; Franco Petrucci Nardelli, "L'immagine e la lettera - le lettere |parlanti' nella tipografia veneziana ed italiana"; Lina Bolzoni, "Parole e immagini per il ritratto di un nuovo Ulisse: l' |invenzione' dell'Aldrovandi per la sua villa di campagna"; Roberto Paolo Ciardi, "Vita attiva e vita contemplativa nelle imprese degli accademici intronati"; and Jay Tribby's "Of Conversational Dispositions and the Saggi's Proem," a suggestive analysis of the Saggi di naturali esperienze of the Accademia del Cimento. Like Mario Biagioli's recent study of Galileo, Tribby's analysis of the early modern science avoids the largely teleological analyses (or what Fumaroli's felicitously calls the "finalisme despotique") of an early generation of historians and roots what is today viewed as the scientific enterprise in the courtly protocols of early modern Italian culture.(3)

If there is a disappointment in the volume as a whole, it lies in the gap between its ambitious theoretical framework and the perhaps inevitably rather narrow focus of several of the case studies. That is, the rather sweeping claims of a Foucauldian "epistemic shift" are not always born out by the particular explorations offered. There is, moreover, here, as in the other anthology under review (Il Nuovo Mondo) another failure, and this one lies in the contemporary culture of scholarly documentation. Neither volume has an index. To be sure, the compilation of an index is painstaking labor, but the absence of this essential guide to such publications impairs their usefulness. Neither, after all, is a work of leisurely reading. To be sure, there are splendid morsels. I highly recommend Nardelli's piece on "lettere parlanti." But authors and editors alike should insist on the inclusion of indexes; and publishers of scholarly books should view the index as an essential component of the works they produce.

The nearly simultaneous publication of these three books - Prosperi and Reinhard's anthology on the cultural implications of the discovery of the New World; Olmi's book on collezionismo and natural history in early modern Europe; and Cropper's collection of essays on documentary culture - make it clear that in late Renaissance studies, the problem of the organization of knowledge and the ways in which the world (both natural and historical) is represented has become a central concern of recent Italian scholarship. Scholarly interest has shifted from a history of what was discovered when to a history of how men and women in the past perceived and interpreted their worlds - from fact to representation. To some degree, the influence of Foucault can be felt in each of these works. But the works also reflect a more general tendency to see the past in highly relativistic terms. Cultural history is no longer part of a progressive narrative in the History of Ideas; i has become instead a gallery of epistemic possibilities. And whatever problems such a shift in historical writing may pose for future scholars, there can be no doubt that this development has made possible an increasingly nuanced and a more sympathetic grasp of late Renaissance and baroque Italy.

Similar methodological perspectives might also serve as well in analyses of earlier periods of Renaissance history. For, as Guglielmo Bottari's critical edition of Guglielmo da Pastrengo's De viris illustribus et de originibus makes evident, the problem of the classification and organization of knowledge was a central issue in fourteenth-century humanist thought as well. Toward the middle of the Trecento, Pastrengo - a humanist, a friend of Petrarch's, and a jurist in Scaligieri's Verona - compiled an encyclopedic biobibliography of pagan and Christian authors. Unlike other works with comparable titles from this period, Pastrengo's compilation was less concerned with moralizing than with establishing a reliable bibliographic repertorium of known authors. Accordingly, his entries - arranged largely by alphabet - are remarkably lapidary. For the most part he leaves out the legends and descriptions that other late medieval and early Renaissance texts had included and provides only the most essential information. Thus even his entry on Aristotle, which is his longest, is given over to a lengthy listing of some one hundred and fifty titles, drawn largely, though not exclusively from the De vita et moribus philosophorum of Walter Burley. On Aristotle himself, Pastrengo provides only the following brief notice:

Aristotiles, philosophus, Nichomachi medici filius et Fescie, gente Trax, patria Stagorita, Olimpo proxima, Socratis primo deinde Platonis discipulus, Alexandri vero Magni preceptor, vir ingenii prestantissimi et divine prope scientie, multa fecundissimi pectoris sui monumenta dereliquit.(6-7)

Bottari's introduction rightly stresses the value of Pastrengo's work for an understanding of early Italian humanism. The repertorium demonstrates a genuine love of books and a desire to preserve their memory for posterity. What Bottari does not stress - and it is a point I believe crucial for our understanding of early humanism - is the degree to which Pastrengo's choices played a role in what we might call "the invention of the author." In Pastrengo's bibliophilia, the authors' virtues and vices are omitted and writers - philosophers, historians, poets, theologians, and so on - become identified almost exclusively with the books they have written. Man ist was man schreibt.

2. Florence: Politics, Economics, and the Poetic Imagination

The Americas were not the only new world discovered in the Renaissance. There was also a new political world, and nowhere was the consciousness of this greater than in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century. In the wake of the reforms of 1494, for example, the celebrated preacher Girolamo Savonarola compared Florence to the early days of the Apostles: "Cosi tu, o Firenze, che sei novissima ("in much the same way, you too, Florence, are most new," II, 462). Indeed, Florence in the period between the expulsion of the Medicini in 1494 and their return in 1512 produced one of the most creative generations of political theorists in western history. As a consequence, historians have come to know it extremely well. There would nonetheless seem to be room for a comprehensive analysis of its institutions such as Guidubaldo Guidi offers us in his compendious three-volume study, Lotte, pensiero e istituzioni politiche nella Repubblica fiorentina.

Like many of Guidi's earlier publications, this one too focuses on the institutional history of Florentine politics in a decisive period.(4) The book is encyclopedic and will be of use, at least for a preliminary orientation, to specialists undertaking research in the Florentine archives or others who wish to have some familiarity with the complexity of the Florentine government at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. The author offers analyses of a wide variety of subjects. He is informative about sources and the institutions that produced them. He discusses the Great Council, the Ottanta, the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, the chancellery, a vast array of magistracies, courts, and financial institutions along with a smattering of political debates and ideas, especially those of Savonarola and his followers. Certain sections, such as his discussion of citizenship, are presented in considerable detail and with some success; but others, such as the three-page discussion devoted to education, are absurdly short and ignore the relevant recent scholarship (in this case, Paul Grendler's important study of schooling in Renaissance Italy).(5)

To be sure, on the theoretical level, Guidi acknowledges the intercionnectedness of things; as he notes promisingly in the introductory section of his book, "in life, general principles, debates, doctrines, and institutions are tightly interwoven, and it is with difficulty that the historian succeeds in disentangling them." (13) He also links his contributions to themes made familiar by such scholars as Felix Gilbert, Quentin Skinner, and J. G. A. Pocock. Yet the volumes present an uneven and rather scattered picture of the period. Furthermore, the author's efforts to be comprehensive tend to overwhelm his sense of the whole. In particular, he seems to have tried to combine two genres of historical writing into one. On the one hand, these volumes contribute a number of interpretative essays on Florentine institutions at a critical juncture in its history; on the other hand, they constitute a strumento di ricerca, a guide to sources, archives, and Renaissance institutions. Certainly, each project would be worthy on its own. Unhappily in this case, the two have been blurred together to the detriment of the usefulness of each.

Franco Franceschi's Oltre il "Tumulto": I lavoratori fiorentini dell'Arte della Lana fra Tre e Quattrocento, by contrast, makes a significant contribution to the historiography of Florence. As the title indicates, Franceschi has made it his concern to analyze the Florentine wool industry and its workers in a far broader context than the Ciompi Revolt. Accordingly, he casts a broad net. His study covers the period running from the 1360s to the 1430s. Although the chronology is far more restricted than Alfred Doren offered in his classic study of the Florentine wool industry, the social and economic analyses are deeper.(6) Moreover, Franceschi has not only read widely in the sources but also in the scholarship - both European and American - with the result that this book properly has a place in broader discussions of the European economy of the late Middle Ages.

Franceschi's approach is both quantitative and structural. He establishes the central role of the wool industry n the Florentine economy throughout the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth century. The picture he offers is dynamic. Measured from a variety of perspectives - the number of workers and shops as well as the volume of output - Florentine wool production fell sharply. The drop in production in turn led to a major shift in the structure of the industry. What had been in the fourteenth century a concentrated industry with a highly dependent "proletariat" became by the early fifteenth century a less centralized industry in which worker - employer relations were now more variegated and personalized. In what is perhaps Franceschi's most fascinating suggestion, we learn that worker networks were transformed as well. The solidarities that had developed in the fourteenth century faded; in the fifteenth century workers, increasingly dependent both on their personal relations with their employers and on their own individual talents, turned less frequently to one another for support and for mutual aid. While these conclusions are not entirely new - Sam Cohn's study on Florentine workers had pointed in a similar direction - they add significantly to the evidence that the early fifteenth century in Florence witnessed a highly consequential shift in the structure of its economy and social organization.(7) Indeed, Franceschi, himself suggests that this structural shift was a decisive factor in the shaping of the Renaissance world of this period. As he observes at the conclusion of his book, "if the early Florentine Renaissance [the early fifteenth century] is described as a period of lessening social conflicts, this was not - I believe - only the result of the development of |an increasingly stable power structure, or of disciplinary and repressive acts carried out by the ruling oligarchy. Equally decisive were shifts that took place between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries within the most important productive sector of the city - shifts that served to reduce the tensions which had played such a large role in the origins of the Ciompi Revolt." (334)

Florence is also at the center of Lucia Bertolini's magisterial edition of Italian poems from the fifteenth century in her De vera amicitia: I testi del primo Certame coronario. In 1441, Leon Battista Alberti organized a poetry contest in Florence on the theme of friendship. In part the contest was meant to take the minds of his fellow Florentines off the political troubles of preceding years; in part, it served as propaganda for the fourth book of Alberti's own Della famiglia, which was dedicated precisely to this theme. Most of Florentine high society turned out for the event, though the judges - and this was something of a scandal - failed to award the laurel (a silver crown) to any of the contestants. Bertolini has performed a service by providing the first reliable critical edition of the corpus of texts that were submitted. Roughly the first half of her edition offers a detailed, technical analysis of the manuscript traditions of the various poems; but the real feast lies in the poems themselves and the extensive commentary the editor appends. The contestants (a group of fourteen, including Alberti himself, Anselmo Calderoni, Leonardo Dati, and Mariotto d'Arrigo Davanzati) were expected to write in the vernacular but to draw on both ancient and modern authorities. Such a corpus serves as a window onto the humanistic culture of Florence in the mid-fifteenth century. As we might expect, such authors as Aristotle and Cicero figure prominently among the ancient authors, but the poets drew also on late classical epitomies of sententiae such as the De nugis philosophorum of Caecilius Balbus and such medieval authorities as Aelred of Rievaulx, Hugh of St. Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas. And while Bertolini's edition is of primary interest to students of Italian literature and Italian humanist poetry in particular, political and cultural historians will also find much of value here, especially in the emphasis many of the poets placed on friendship as a foundation of the civic life.

3. Venetian Finale

While many of these studies make important contributions to Renaissance scholarship, none explores the interrelationship of political and cultural life in the same depth as Gaetano Cozzi in his "Venezia nello scenario europeo (1517-1699)," the first section of La Repubblica di Venezia nell'eta moderna: Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica, the second volume devoted to Venice in the UTET Storia d'Italia series.(8)

Cozzi has devoted his scholarly career to the study of early modern Venice and, in particular, to the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Venice in the early seventeenth century - the period of the Interdict (1607-08) and the age of Sarpi. The fruits of his labors are well known to modern European historians. He has shown a mastery of intellectual, legal, and religious history that is virtually without parallel in his generation, equally impressive have been his efforts to grasp the ways in which religious currents and political structures intersected in the lives and the experience of the Venetian patriciate.(9) Indeed, the strength of his contribution to La Repubblica di Venezia nell'eta moderna lies in his ability now to extend his insights throughout a much longer period, from the early sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Throughout Cozzi maintains a coherent vision: namely, that Venetian politics, especially Venetian policies on the international stage, were shaped above all by the tensions between those members of its ruling class who placed their loyalties to Venice ahead of Rome and those, by contrast, who believed that their loyalties to Rome should be determining.

"Qualcosa era cambiata dopo Agnadello" ("something had changed after Agnadello"), Cozzi writes of Venetian political and cultural life in the wake of the devastating defeat delivered to the Republic in 1509(21). Venice's period of territorial expansion had ended, and along with it the relative solidarity of its patriciate. The early sixteenth century witnessed the growing influence of those Venetian nobles who were willing to see Rome's power strengthened and whose greatest political concern on the international stage became the Republic's stability rather than its greatness. This is not to deny the existence of tensions in the ruling class. Cozzi traces these throughout the Cinquecento, especially as they were manifest in Venetian policy toward the Ottoman Turks, against whom war was virtually chronic. These very tensions too were defining in the Correction of the Council of Ten in the early 1580s. At the time of this well-known constitutional reform, the giovani, those Venetian patricians who were willing to take bolder initiatives on the European stage, managed to curtail what they viewed as the excessive powers of the vecchi, the patricians who were by experience more oligarchic and who insisted that the Republic's welfare depended on cooperation with Rome. Indeed, it would be the giovani who would come to the forefront at the time of the Interdict. In the seventeenth century, we see a Venice increasingly active on the international stage; appropriately Cozzi continues his history not only to the War of Candia but through the Peace of Karlowitz (1699).

Cozzi's style, it should be noted, is demanding. He has chosen to present the history in a rapid succession of succinct overviews of major developments in Venetian political and ecclesiastical history. The brevity of the sections, however, does not represent - as is so often the case in surveys of this sort - a tendency to simplify. To the contrary, Cozzi's own dialogue with the past is always probing; his individual sentences are complex, filled with subtleties; his generalizations cautiously but generously tendered. All scholars of European history - and not only those whose research focuses on early modern Italy - should have a chance to study this work.

Venice is also at the center of Antonino Poppi's brief book Cremonini, Galilei e gli inquisitori del Santo a Padova.(10) In 1592 - one hundred years after Columbus' first voyage to the New World - Galileo Galileo, whose writings would open up a new scientific universe, was appointed professor of mathematics in Padua. His years there were relatively uneventful in contrast to his life in Tuscany where, after he assumed the position of philosopher and chief mathematician to the Grand Duke in 1610, ideas became the focus of one of the greatest scientific controversies in early modern history. The courtier Galileo had increased his income and his prestige but, as his two trials by the Roman Inquisition (the first in 1615-16; the second in 1633) indicate, he had lost the intellectual freedom he enjoyed in the Republic of Venice.

Antonino Poppi's book (part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's arrival in Padua) adds a new dimension to Galileo's story. Prior to this work, the earliest evidence historians had of inquisitorial suspicions of Galileo dated from 1611. Now, on the basis of a discovery in Venice's Archivio di Stato, Poppi authoritatively pushes this date back to 1604 when Silvestro Pagnoni (in all likehood Galileo's former amanuensis) denounced Galileo for certain astrological practices, and, in particular (as the inquisitors stated in their summary of his testimony), "for having argued that the stars, the planets, and celestial influences determine (human actions]" (43). Moreover, the sources Poppi has found even suggest that Galileo had an earlier run-in (about which we know virtually nothing) with the Holy Office in Florence. Pagnoni is recorded to have testified about his former employer as follows: "I believe his mother spoke out against her son at the Holy Office in Florence; and he abuses her, with the most outrageous insults, calling her a whore and a hag; what's more, his mother has even told me that a warning was sent to him at his home in Florence." ("Io credo che la madre sia stata al Santo Officio a Fiorenzza contra detto suo fiolo, et la strapazza dicendole villanie grandissime: putana, gabrina. Subdens etiam: anci, che sua madre mi ha anco detto che in Fiorenzza glie fu mandato un cartelo a casa dal S. Officio.") (54)

Poppi's volume offers an edition of these newly discovered inquisitorial materials and other documents related to this case and a nearly simultaneous case involving the philosopher Cesare Cremonini, Galileo's distinguished colleague at the University of Padua. Historians of philosophy and of the history of the European university will find much of interest here. But Poppi's book will also engage political and religious historians, for in both these cases, we are able to follow the efforts of the Venetian government to keep matters quiet. Indeed, the tensions between the concerns of the ruling elite in Venice for stability and independence from Rome reflect the ambiance that Cozzi has described in his general analyses of this period. Finally, Poppi's thorough introductory essay, along with his detailed notes to the texts of the documents, will serve scholars well in their future explorations of these episodes.

4. Conclusions

Venice, Florence, and Rome - for better or worse, the study of the Renaissance in Italy remains a tale of these three cities as centers of intellectual discovery, creative activity, and political experimentation. If there is a new turn, it is toward an increased emphasis on the late Italian Renaissance and its connections with Italy in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the economic and social history of the Italian peninsula (as we see in Franceschi's discussion of the role of immigration in the Florentine wool industry as well as in Cozzi's and Knapton's complementary overviews of early modern Venice) make it plain that even the major centers of the Renaissance were part of a much larger whole about which we still know relatively little.

The present seems an auspicious time for expanding Renaissance studies both temporally and geographically. Clearly we can benefit from further explorations of the relationship of the Italian Renaissance to the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of both the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. We also need more analyses of the social and cultural histories of the less well known Italian cities and towns, both on their own terms and with attention to the ways in which the histories of these localities were connected to the development of the major centers. On the other hand, who would have recognized how little we have known - indeed how little we still know - about such celebrated figures as Columbus and Galileo, or even about such seemingly familiar places as Florence and Venice in the Renaissance?

(1) See, for example, J. H. Elliot's review of David Stannard's The American Holocaust in The New York Review of Books, 12 June 1993, 36-41, with a response by Stannard and Elliot's answer in the 21 October 1993 issue, 95-96. For an overview of much of the scholarship on Columbus and its relationship to the Quincentenary, see Simon Schama, "They all Laughed at Christopher Columbus," The New Republic, 6 January 1992, 30-40. (2) On Dal Pozzo, see Francesco Solinas, Cassiano dal Pozzo: Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studi (Rome: De Luca, 1989). (3) Compare Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier.. The Practice of Science in the Culture Of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). (4) See, for example, Guidubaldo Guidi, Il governo della citta-repubblica di Firenze del primo Quattrocento (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 3 vols. (5) Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). (6) Alfred Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. I: Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom 14. bis zum 16 Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1991). (7) Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr., The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980). (8) This volume - which follows Michael Knapton and Gaetano Cozzi, La Repubblica di Venezia nell'eta moderna: Dalla guerra di Chiogga al 1517 (Turin: UTET, 1989) - is made up of three significant essays - each of which could be a book by itself. I discuss only Cozzi's contributions here, but Michael Knapton's essay "Tra Dominante c Dominio (1517-1630)" is of great interest and offers an excellent synthesis of the social history of Venice and its relationship to its subject territories in the early modern period. Knapton's study, moreover, is more than a companion piece to Cozzi; it is clear that there is a growing consensus among political, social, and economic historians that the great cities of Italy cannot really be understood without careful attention to the territories they dominated. Finally, Giovanni Scarabella's "Il Settecento" constitutes a much needed overview of the history of eighteenth-century Venice. The book treats themes far beyond the competence of this reviewer. (9) Cozzi's major works include Il doge Niccolo Contarini: Ricerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1958); Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e l'Europa (Turin: Einaudi, 1979); and Repubblica di Venezia e stati italiani: politica e giustizia dal secolo XVI al secolo XVIII (Turine Einaudi, 1982). (10) This is an expanded version of the author's Cremonini e Galilei inquisiti a Padova nel 1604: Nuovi documenti d'archivio (Padua: Antenore, 1992). (1992).