Venice Reconsidered offers a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchical, the scholars in this volume present a more fluid and complex interpretation of Venetian culture. Drawing on a variety of disciplines—history, art history, and musicology—these essays present innovative variants of the myth of Venice—that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories Venetians told about themselves.

John Jeffries Martin, author of Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City and editor of The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad, is a professor of history at Trinity University. Dennis Romano, author of Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State and Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600, is a professor of history at Syracuse University.