BiblioVault - Books about 697-1508

The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello

Margaret L. King

University of Chicago Press, 1994

Margaret King shows what the death of a little boy named Valerio Marcello over five hundred years ago can tell us about his time.

This child, scion of a family of power and privilege at Venice's time of greatness, left his father in a state of despair so profound and so public that it occasioned an outpouring of consoling letters, orations, treatises, and poems. In these documents, we find a firsthand account, richly colored by humanist conventions and expectations, of the life of the fifteenth-century boy, the passionate devotion of his father, the feelings of his brothers and sisters, the striking absence of his mother. The father's story is here as well: the career of a Venetian nobleman and scholar, patron and soldier, a participant in Venice's struggle for dominion in the north of Italy.

Through these sources also King traces the cultural trends that made Marcello's century famous. Her work enlarges our view of the literature of consolation, which had a distinctive tradition in Venice, and shifting attitudes toward death from the late Middle Ages onward.

For the depth and acuity of its insights into political, cultural, and private life in fifteenth-century Venice, this book will be essential reading for students of the Renaissance. For the grace and drama of its storytelling, it will be savored by anyone who wishes to look into life and death in a palace, and a city, long ago.

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The Documents of Angelo de Cartura and Donato Fontanella

Venetian Notaries in Fourteenth-Century Crete

Alan M. Stahl

Harvard University Press, 2000

This volume, which includes the texts in Latin with an English preface and extensive indices, contains the text of two notarial protocols in the Notai di Candia series of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia. Both notaries were active in the town of Candia, modern Herakleion, in the Venetian colony of Crete in the early fourteenth century.Though the two protocols published here are fragmentary in terms of their survival, and selective in the aspects of life that they record, they are both valuable sources for understanding the lives of Venetian, Greek, and Jewish men and women in fourteenth-century Crete.

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History of Venice

Pietro BemboEdited and translated by Robert W. Ulery, Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2007

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. His early dialogue on the subject of love greatly influenced the development of the literary vernacular, as did his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). From 1513 to 1521, he served Pope Leo X as Latin secretary and became known as the leading advocate of Ciceronian Latin in Europe and of the Tuscan dialect within Italy. He was named official historian of Venice in 1529 and began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city’s history in twelve books, covering the years from 1487 to 1513. Although the work chronicles internal politics and events, much of it is devoted to the external affairs of Venice, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. The History of Venice was published after Bembo’s death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, completed by this third volume, makes it available for the first time in English translation.

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History of Venice

Pietro BemboEdited and translated by Robert W. Ulery, Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2007

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. His early dialogue on the subject of love greatly influenced the development of the literary vernacular, as did his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). From 1513 to 1521 he served Pope Leo X as Latin secretary and became known as the leading advocate of Ciceronian Latin in Europe and of the Tuscan dialect within Italy. He was named official historian of Venice in 1529 and began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city’s history in twelve books, covering the years from 1487 to 1513. Although the work chronicles internal politics and events, much of it is devoted to the external affairs of Venice, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. The History of Venice was published after Bembo’s death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, in a projected three volumes, makes it available for the first time in English translation.

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History of Venice

Pietro BemboEdited and translated by Robert W. Ulery, Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2007

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. His early dialogue on the subject of love greatly influenced the development of the literary vernacular, as did his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). From 1513 to 1521 he served Pope Leo X as Latin secretary and became known as the leading advocate of Ciceronian Latin in Europe and of the Tuscan dialect within Italy. He was named official historian of Venice in 1529 and began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city's history in twelve books, covering the years from 1487 to 1513. Although the work chronicles internal politics and events, much of it is devoted to the external affairs of Venice, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. The History of Venice was published after Bembo's death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, in a projected three volumes, makes it available for the first time in English translation.

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Venice

William H. McNeill

University of Chicago Press, 2009

In this magisterial history, National Book Award winner William H. McNeill chronicles the interactions and disputes between Latin Christians and the Orthodox communities of eastern Europe during the period 1081–1797. Concentrating on Venice as the hinge of European history in the late medieval and early modern period, McNeill explores the technological, economic, and political bases of Venetian power and wealth, and the city’s unique status at the frontier between the papal and Orthodox Christian worlds. He pays particular attention to Venetian influence upon southeastern Europe, and from such an angle of vision, the familiar pattern of European history changes shape.

“No other historian would have been capable of writing a book as direct, as well-informed and as little weighed down by purple prose as this one. Or as impartial. McNeill has succeeded admirably.”—Fernand Braudel, Times Literary Supplement

“The book is serious, interesting, occasionally compelling, and always suggestive.”—Stanley Chojnacki, American Historical Review

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Venice's Most Loyal City

Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia

Stephen D. Bowd

Harvard University Press, 2010

By the second decade of the fifteenth century Venice had established an empire in Italy extending from its lagoon base to the lakes, mountains, and valleys of the northwestern part of the peninsula. The wealthiest and most populous part of this empire was the city of Brescia which, together with its surrounding territory, lay in a key frontier zone between the politically powerful Milanese and the economically important Germans. Venetian governance there involved political compromise and some sensitivity to local concerns, and Brescians forged their distinctive civic identity alongside a strong Venetian cultural presence.

Based on archival, artistic, and architectural evidence, Stephen Bowd presents an innovative microhistory of a fascinating, yet historically neglected city. He shows how Brescian loyalty to Venice was repeatedly tested by a succession of disasters: assault by Milanese forces, economic downturn, demographic collapse, and occupation by French and Spanish armies intent on dismembering the Venetian empire. In spite of all these troubles the city experienced a cultural revival and a dramatic political transformation under Venetian rule, which Bowd describes and uses to illuminate the process of state formation in one of the most powerful regions of Renaissance Italy.

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