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

John Martin and Dennis Romano, eds. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797.

Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xviii + 538 PP. index. illus. $45. ISBN: 0-8018-6312-0.

In 1973, J.R. Hale edited a volume of essays which brought together a number of important international scholars working in the burgeoning field of Venetian studies. That volume, entitled Renaissance Venice, contained a number of influential essays that gave both a snapshot of the field at the time and suggested new ways of thinking about some key issues. The text has remained a standard point of departure for Venetian scholars since its publication. Twenty-five years later, scholars from Europe and the United States convened at Syracuse University to revisit Hale's volume, and to examine the developments in Venetian studies on the cusp of the twenty-first century. A selection of the papers presented at this gathering have been collected in Venice Reconsidered. While one might have hoped for a broader treatment of Venetian culture and society, the editors of the volume explicitly state at the outset that this is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Venice. Instead, its objective, rather broadly defin ed, is to show the dynamism and diversity (some might say the particularism), as well as the interdisciplinary character of Venetian studies today.

Collected volumes often suffer from a lack of cohesion and consistency among their constituent parts, and Venice Reconsidered is no exception. Many of the essays are interesting, several even important. One of the most valuable contributions is the introduction by Dennis Romano and John Martin, who provide a brief overview of some of the key historiographical issues that have occupied scholars of Venice since the fall of the Republic in 1797. The bulk of the essay, though, focuses on the years since the Hale volume was published and suggests the directions recent research has taken and clearly sets out the state of Venetian studies today. It is a model of historiographical synthesis and provides an invaluable overview for anyone interested in the evolution of the study of Venice.

As Romano and Martin amply document, one of the main foci of Venetian studies in the past half century has been to debate and debunk the so-called myth of Venice. A key element in this myth depicted Venice as a stable oasis in the disorderly Italian peninsula, the anti-Florence. Venice's order and stability were a result, according to the mythmakers, of its hierarchical society which was marked by well-defined, impermeable social categories. A number of the most interesting essays in Venice Reconsidered convincingly challenge this view of Venice as a closed social hierarchy. Gerhard Rosch, for example, shows that what traditionally has been seen as the decisive event in Venetian history, the serrata or closing of the Grand Council in 1297, was in fact not a one-time legislative event, but rather an extended process of social and political adaptation and adjustment. His views build on the seminal work of Stanley Chojnacki, whose essay in the Hale volume was one of the most influential, early statements on the patriciate's attempts to define itself. Chojnacki's contribution to the present volume continues in this vein: he argues that the process of defining the ruling elite, was an even more drawn-out process than Rosch indicates, extending to what Chojnacki sees as a second, and even a third serrata. In this long-term view of patrician self-definition, the early sixteenth century is a key moment, when legislation was passed which intruded "into the most intimate areas of private life, making marriage, birth, and wifehood the pivotal elements in the new patrician order" (267). This happened in response to the serious social, political, and economic challenges which Venice confronted in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The result was the culmination of a 250-year process of carving out the patriciate's collective identity.

Where Rosch and Chojnacki focus on the nobility, James Grubb's contribution examines the unique Venetian social estate, the "Elite Citizens" or cittadini, which it has been argued, served as a buffer between the patriciate and the plebian popolo and thus played a key role in maintaining the serenity of La Serenissima. Grubb shows convincingly that Venetians and other contemporaries could not themselves agree on the social categories and divisions of their city, and thus the construction of the cittadini as a distinct category in Venetian society was a lengthy process in some ways not dissimilar to the closing of the patriciate. Who the cittadini were and were not remained ill-defined and achieved clarity only gradually over the course of the sixteenth century, culminating in the citizen serrata of 1569.

What these three authors clearly indicate, and other essays allude to, is what I believe is the most important theme of Venice Reconsidered, that is that Venetian society, instead of being fixed and closed, was fluid and permeable. This new way of thinking about Venice provides important insights that suggest that the city may have maintained relative peace and order, not because it was a tightly-defined, hierarchical society, as the myth suggests, but rather because of its malleability, diversity, and adaptability, the fuzziness of its social boundaries.

There are a number of other intriguing essays in the collection which warrant mention. Edward Muir's contribution addresses two themes that have engendered much discussion among scholars of Venice, republicanism, and Venice's rule of its terraferma state. He asks the provocative question whether it mattered if one lived under a prince or a republic. His case study of the small Friulian town of Buia shows how the town preserved a degree of liberty as it navigated the interstices between local oligarchs and "the conflicting jurisdictions and competing powers" of Venetian officials and magistracies (158). Through a process of "continuous litigation" which never resolved issues of clashing privileges, but rather institutionalized them, Buia and other similar towns created a space for negotiation and at least a degree of independence (154).

One area ignored entirely in Hale's volume, gender history, has been the focus of much important work in the intervening years. While most research has focused on the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Federica Ambrosini's essay treats the less familiar terrain of the last two centuries of the Venetian Republic. Her findings complement the work of other recent scholars, such as Joanne Ferraro, who have argued that the experiences of women were more varied and complex than simple accession to patrician marital strategies of either maritaror monacar, and that women found a range of ways in which to exercise agency and power in their lives. Ambrosini's research, based on Venice's vast notarial registers, shows that the penetration of Enlightenment ideas and ideals, combined with social, cultural, and institutional changes in a number of areas, such as the availability of divorce, the control of dowries, participation in confraternities and guilds, and female literacy, led to an increase in women's options and independence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The final essay in the volume, Claudio Povolo's reflection on Venetian historiography after the fall of the Republic in 1797, is also one of the most thought-provoking. Through an examination of the most important nineteenth-century histories of Venice, Povolo demonstrates the nexus of the memory and interpretation of Venice's past, and its political and ideological implications in the debates and agendas of Italy's nationalist and fascist eras. Of particular importance in these studies was the success or failure of Venice's ruling class to integrate its subject territories and the implications this had for the eventual end of the republic, all of which spoke directly to the challenges the nascent Italian Republic faced in inventing itself after 1860.

My chief criticism of Venice Reconsidered is more one of omission than commission. The editors state at the outset that their intention is not "to offer a comprehensive overview of Venice's past (xi)," and so it is perhaps unfair to fault them for what it is missing. Still, the volume seems to lean a bit heavily toward social history, at the expense of a more balanced, broader discussion. Most glaring is the absence of any treatment of Venice's religious history, despite the important advances of the past thirty years in this field. Whether the editors intended to provide an expansive overview of Venice in its second 500 years or not, it seems impossible to understand the culture of medieval and early modern Venice without some discussion of religion. Also missing, given the volume's emphasis on the multicultural nature of Venice, is any treatment of the diverse subcultures of Greeks, Jews, and Ottomans that inhabited the city and its empire, about which a great deal has been written in recent years. And whil e economic history has moved from center stage, some discussion of recent trends would have rounded out the volume.

If Venice Reconsidered does not provide as complete a picture of medieval and early modern Venetian culture as one might have hoped, it does achieve its goal of portraying many aspects of the rich diversity and complexity that has characterized Venetian studies in the past thirty years. In the final analysis, while Venice Reconsidered may not replace Renaissance Venice on scholar's bookshelves and graduate reading lists, it certainly represents an important supplement to this seminal volume.