The New Venice: Historians and Historiography in the 21st Century Lagoon

Abstract

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.

The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

“…The social and economic history of Venice had its heydays during the 1960s and 1970s, mainly due to the influence of the works of Fernand Braudel and the École des Annales, but it has become since then of less importance. The most notable novelty in this recent historiography, and something already discussed in the literature (Horodowich, 2004) is the surge in the number of important studies dealing with a new social history, marking "a shift in interest from order to disorder, from orthodoxy to dissent, from the center of power to the broader social context" (Davidson, 1997). Examples in this respect are the relatively new trends of gender and women history.…”

“…As a consequence, studies proliferate and new avenues of research are being opened with increased frequency. Venice can effectively be considered as a playground, representative of the most recent trends in historiographical research (Horodowich, 2004). In this context, it appears not at all trivial to ask the question on how the intellectual landscape of the historians of Venice is organized, given the novelty of new scholarship, but also its need to dialog with the past to forge its identity (Davidson, 1997).…”