Venice a documentary history, 1450-1630 (review)

Reviews 141 Erasmus's annotations follow with the editors' notes to his text. All three are in different places, and cross-referencing requires an awkward exercise with fingers and thumbs. One remembers with nostalgia the days of footnotes, but that so handsome and perfect an edition as C W E no longer uses the footnote confirms, I fear, that w e must abandon hope on that score. Erasmus's annotations are mostly explanatory. They also relate personal experiences or give, sometimes with daring, personal views. Above all, he indicates his identification with Jerome on some issues (the correction of clerical abuses, the Christian uses of classical learning) or his distancing himself from him on others (the absolute superiority of monasticism, virginity). This admirable edition offers the English-speaking student the resources for exploring the complex relationship between these two historic figures. Bruce E. Mansfield Department of History University of Sydney Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, with Jennifer Fletcher, eds, Venice a documentary history, 1450-1630, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992; paper; pp. xxiv, 484; 8 illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$45.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin). This is an excellent collection of documents, reminiscent of Gene Brucker's The society ofRenaissance Florence: a documentary study. M y only disappointment with the book is its focus on the period between 1450-1630. I would have preferred the editorstoconcentrate, as Bmcker did, on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This, however, is personal preference. The editors compensate by producing a book that is longer, and more comprehensive in its coverage, than Brucker's volume. The editors justify 1450 by pointing to the establishment of the Venetian empire on the Italian mainland by this date, and they argue that indications of the decline in Venetian political and economic power are evident by 1630, when the plague devastated the city. The editors' introductory comments to the documents are valuable but short and not intrusive, leaving more space for the documents. Although Chambers, Pullan, and Fletcher have written the introductions and have translated the bulk of the documents , the volume is a collaborative effort by 27 academics, mainly members of the Venetian Seminar that meets in various places in Scotland and England. These contributors have suggested the inclusion of some documents and have translated them. Despite this translation by 'committee' the documents are very enoyable reading. John Law's translation of a visiting pilgrim's credulous account of the death of a Doge and election of another in 1462 is a good example. One omission from the bibliography that might confuse some readers is Venezia e la 142 Reviews peste, 1348-1797 (Venice, 1979), which is twice cited in a much abbreviated form on p. 114. Following thefirstpart on general descriptions of Venice, the documents cover authority and government law and order, social policy, public and private wealth, religion, the three social orders of nobility, citizenry and workers, charity and the poor, foreign communities within the city (that is, Germans, Greeks, Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, and Turks) culture, and the visual arts. As summarized by the editors, the collection includes observers' descriptions of Venice, chronicles and diaries, letters, myth-making literature and polemical denunciations, legislation, petitions, minute-books of guilds and hospitals and religious brotherhoods, wills, notarial acts, trial records, and state budgets. Some of m y favourites include: the description of the plague of 1575-77 by Rocco Benedetti, who had to take the bodies of his mother, brother, and nephew to the street and then endure a quarantine at home; the account of an Anabaptist synod at Venice in 1550 by Don Pietro Manelfi, who returned to Catholicism in 1551; the Inquisition's interrogation of Veronese in 1573 concerning his painting of the Last Supper; a summary of the Venetian charitable institutions in 1497 by Battista Sfondrato, the Milanese ambassador in Venice, who admitted his difficulty in understanding the situation; Albrect Durer's comments on Venetian painters, some of w h o m were so antagonistic to Durer that he was advised not to eat or drink with them; and Palma Giovane's recollections of the elderly Titian at work (' . . . in the last stages he painted more with the finger than with the brush'). Disappointing...