For the first time in a generation, leading scholars of medieval and Renaissance Venice join forces to define the current state of the field and to reveal in its rich diversity. Forays into neglected aspects of Venetian studies reveal new insights into coinage and concubinage, the first Jewish ghetto and the Fourth Crusade, and matters from dowry inflation to state spectacle to cheese...

Originally published in 1985. Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller, in the first volume of Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, discuss Venice's economic achievement in terms of the complex system the city's inhabitants developed to manage moneys of account and coins. Money merchants of Venice developed a system whereby a premium attached to moneys of account acted as a stabilizing force and allowed merchants to engage in long-term trade. This system, according to the authors, helped establish Venice as a dominant city-state in international trade and exchange. This book outlines the development and success of this system through 1508. At the time it was first published, this book made a significant contribution to the history of money and economics by underscoring the large role that Venice played in the economic history of the West and the ascendance of capitalism as a structuring force of society.

It sets banking—and panics—in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

Carved on stone, painted on canvas, wood or porcelain, stitched on fabric, written on parchment or printed on paper, the 109 inscriptions in this unique collection preserve the surviving public writing of Venice's individuals and collectivities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They celebrate the completion, authorship or sponsorship of buildings, sculptures, paintings, reliquaries and shrines. They caption the splendid mappa mundi of Fra Mauro and Jacopo de' Barbari's iconic view of Venice. They declare the ownership of a processional banner, of the recipient of a maiolica plate, and of neighbourhood association properties. They record wills, indulgences and appeals. They mark the graves of confraternities, a barber-surgeon and a master mason. They can be found from Piazza San Marco to the corners of Cannaregio and Castello as well as on the lagoon islands. Written in the vernacular, their weight of presence, unmatched by any other Italian centre, attests to the city's exceptional literacy in our period and provides a wealth of privileged historical information. The corpus, with accompanying photographic record, is the first of its kind. It is thoroughly contextualized and analysed in terms of historical and artistic background, script and language.

The medieval palaces of Venice are unlike those from anywhere else and they also survive in this equally unique city in far greater numbers. This well-presented study argues, however, that contrary to other opinions, the architecture of Venice was developed from that of northern and western Europe and not from that of Byzantium and Late Antiquity.

"Wide-ranging in place and time, yet tightly focused on particular concerns, these new and original specialist articles show how observations on the early history of warfare based on the relatively stable conditions of the late seventeenth century ignore the realities of war at sea in the middle ages and renaissance. In these studies, naval historians firmly grounded in the best current understanding of the period take account of developments in ships, guns and the language of public policy on war at sea, and in so doing give a stimulating introduction to five hundred years of maritime violence in Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed. Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode. Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.