Although the Renaissance is typically most closely associated with the city of Florence, recent scholarship on the history of Venice provocatively calls this connection into question. While humanism and classicism have traditionally characterized the Renaissance in Florence, historians now argue that the vibrancy of early modern culture also resulted from inc reased cross‐cultural interaction, the development of capitalism and markets, and the process of statebuilding. When one views the Renaissance in this light, Venice takes on a new importance in the early modern world as the epicenter from which the energies of the early modern world emanated. Recent Venetian scholarship also hotly debates a variety of other topics, such as gender and women's history and religious culture, all suggesting that the Venetian archives offer a particularly rich and abundant site at which to study the early modern world.