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Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice
Richard Tilden Rapp
Harvard University Press, 1976
One of the oldest, most commanding topics in early modern economic history--Venice's fall from commercial supremacy to relative insignificance--is here examined. What emerges is what many scholars have come to suspect: the catch-all phrase "the decline of Venice" embodies a myth. Rapp explains the paradox of seventeenth-century Venice, a republic that experienced a relative economic decline in commerce and industry with no absolute decline in overall income. In this systematic approach to the subject of economic decline, Rapp focuses on economic factors common to all Venetian enterprise: labor supply and quality, technology and capital employment, foreign demand, and government policy. The statistical backbone of this massively documented book is an employment census of the city derived from the records of the Naval Personnel Administration, the Collegio da Milizia da Mar. Throughout the book, many analytical insights are offered about population, guilds, technology, and economic policy in early modern Europe.
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front cover of Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice
Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice
The Works of Sarra Copia Sulam in Verse and Prose Along with Writings of Her Contemporaries in Her Praise, Condemnation, or Defense
Sarra Copia Sulam
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The first Jewish woman to leave her mark as a writer and intellectual, Sarra Copia Sulam (1600?–41) was doubly tainted in the eyes of early modern society by her religion and her gender. This remarkable woman, who until now has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship, was a unique figure in Italian cultural life, opening her home, in the Venetian ghetto, to Jews and Christians alike as a literary salon.

For this bilingual edition, Don Harrán has collected all of Sulam’s previously scattered writings—letters, sonnets, a Manifesto—into a single volume. Harrán has also assembled all extant correspondence and poetry that was addressed to Sulam, as well as all known contemporary references to her, making them available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Featuring rich biographical and historical notes that place Sulam in her cultural context, this volume will provide readers with insight into the thought and creativity of a woman who dared to express herself in the male-dominated, overwhelmingly Catholic Venice of her time.

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