introduction 19
of departure for venetian scholars. The popular fascination with venice
was satiated by John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice, a fine enough
treatment of venetian history in the political and diplomatic narrative
tradition. In france, while not a history of venice per se, the centrality of
the city in one of the great works of 20th-century historiography, fernand
Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II, first published in 1949 with a revised edition in 1966, certainly
contributed to this resurgence.
In the United States, the father of modern American scholarship on
venice, frederic C. Lane, published Venice: A Maritime Republic in 1973,
the first significant attempt at a scholarly, comprehensive history of ven-
ice in english since the turn of the century. This was the culmination
of a lifetime of study, and while following a loose chronological format
and providing a functional political narrative, the book takes numerous,
lengthy detours into Lane’s areas of research—shipping, naval warfare,
commerce, and industry. As the title suggests, the focus is heavily directed
toward maritime venice, often to the exclusion of the terraferma. While
the book was greeted with almost universal acclaim upon its publication,
an unusually scathing review penned by two well-respected historians at
the University of Chicago, eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner, challenged
everything from Lane’s use of dated historical interpretations to more
petty grammatical errors. Most damning, however, was their charge that
Lane had dusted off many of the old myths of venice as an oasis of equal-
ity and political consensus in the service of an equally mythical view of
the modern American incarnation of these republican ideals, what Renzo
Pecchioli called elsewhere the “ideologia americana.”52 Despite this fierce,
but isolated, critique, to which Lane never responded, the book retains
ongoing currency among scholars and is widely used in university courses,
though it is now dated in terms of the significant body of scholarship on
venice that has been produced in the intervening decades.
Returning to Italy, another, more modest collaboration is the three
volumes on venice in the UTeT Storia d’Italia series. Giorgio Cracco’s
Un ‘altro mondo’: Venezia nel medioevo dal secolo XI al secolo XIV was pub-
lished in 1986, as was Gaetano Cozzi and Michael Knapton’s La Repubblica
di Venezia nell’età moderna, which covers the period from the war of
52 eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner, “Deconstructing Lane’s venice,” Journal of Modern
History 47 (1975), 321–34; Renzo Pecchioli, Dal ‘mito’ di Venezia all’‘ideologia americana’:
itinerari e modelli della storiografia sul repubblicanesimo dell’età moderna (venice, 1983),
pp. 161–62.