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Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, a woodcut first printed in the year 1500, presents a bird’s-eye portrait of Venice at its peak as an international hub of trade, art, and culture. An artistic and cartographic masterpiece of the Renaissance, the View depicts Venice as a vibrant, waterborne city interconnected by canals and bridges and filled with ornate buildings, elaborate gardens, and seafaring vessels. The contributors to A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City draw on a high-resolution digital scan of the over nine-foot-wide composite print to examine the complexities of this extraordinary woodcut and portrayal of early modern Venetian life. The essays show how the View constitutes an advanced material artifact of artistic, humanist, and scientific culture. They also outline the ways the print reveals information about the city’s economic and military power, religious and social infrastructures, and cosmopolitan residents. Featuring methodological advancements in the digital humanities, A View of Venice highlights the reality and myths of a topographically unique, mystical city and its place in the world.

Contributors. Karen-edis Barzman, Andrea Bellieni, Patricia Fortini Brown, Valeria Cafà, Stanley Chojnacki, Tracy E. Cooper, Giada Damen, Julia A. DeLancey, Piero Falchetta, Ludovica Galeazzo, Maartje van Gelder, Jonathan Glixon, Richard Goy, Anna Christine Swartwood House, Kristin Love Huffman, Holly Hurlburt, Claire Judde de Larivière, Blake de Maria, Martina Massaro, Cosimo Monteleone, Monique O’Connell, Mary Pardo, Giorgio Tagliaferro, Saundra Weddle, Bronwen Wilson, Rangsook Yoon

Readers encountering the Middle English Arthurian tradition are confronted by three texts with confusingly similar titles: an anonymous poem in alliterative verse called Morte Arthure, an anonymous poem in eight-line stanzas entitled Le Morte Arthur, and Sir Thomas Malory’s influential prose Arthuriad, LeMorte Darthur [sic]. To add to the confusion, Malory made use of both English poems to augment his French sources in composing his Morte Darthur, so specialists often speak of two or more of these English Mortes in the same breath. Yet each Morte poem deserves to be studied on its own merits. 

Arthurian Intertextualities offers new readings of Malory’s Morte as well as the two English poems that most influenced him. Tolhurst and Whetter situate Malory’s Arthur story in the context of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Combining these contexts with intertextual analysis of scenes and characters from Le Morte Darthur and both sources, the authors illustrate the full extent of Malory’s debt to these two English poems while making a stronger case for Malory’s artistry—and the stanzaic-poet’s artistry—than previous scholarship has acknowledged. These new readings demand a reassessment of Arthurian women, kingship, and warfare and heroism, including reconsidering the alliterative-poet’s attitude to war and to Arthur as conqueror. The authors also offer a spirited defense of Malory’s Guenevere, who remains frequently maligned by scholars, and argue for Palomydes’s acceptance by his Round Table Fellowship. Arthurian Intertextualities will appeal to readers who are interested in the book that serves as the source for most of the Arthuriana (whether novels, plays, works of art, or films) in today’s world: Le Morte Darthur.