48 alfredo viggiano
This crucial renovation in Venetian historical studies was promoted by
a young generation of Italian scholars educated in the oppressive years
of the fascist dictatorship, together with researchers trained in Ameri-
can universities, often by German professors who had emigrated for
political, religious, or racial reasons from the violence of Hitler’s regime,
and finally by the great intellectual stature of Fredric Lane. Venice and
Florence became the cities of choice for a series of projects of economic,
social, and politico-constitutional history that asked new questions and
freed themselves from traditional categories. This was true above all for
studies regarding Venice and the Veneto, which were known for their
strongly parochial character and closure to methodological novelty. This
newfound vitality was further animated in many respects by the climate
of the “cold war” and the division of the geo-political map into two great
blocs. Ideology certainly did not distort the profile of the most serious
and innovative investigations of political and constitutional history, and
actually lent them a special vigor—from those of Nicolai Rubinstein to
Felix Gilbert, Gaetano Cozzi to William Bouwsma. But it forced them to
proceed along the lines of clear dichotomies: authority versus law, despo-
tism against liberty, autonomy against submission.2 The question of the
origins of “civic liberties” as well as that of republican civic identity and
its moments of crisis and affirmation thus served a functional purpose in
the pursuit of a genealogy of democratic and liberal modernity.
With the end of that world and that historiographical season, work in
more recent years has been characterized by an explosion of research in
multiple directions (and Venetian history is certainly not alone in this
respect). Political and institutional histories have been touched in their
own peculiar way by the crisis of the hermeneutical paradigms that had
previously held sway. Yet it would be wrong to interpret this loss of a cen-
ter as reflecting an irreversible crisis. Rather, I would prefer to accentuate
the aspects of originality and creativity of the numerous studies published
beginning in the 1990s.
I shall attempt here to present a summary of the principal moments
of Venetian political and constitutional history from the beginning of the
15th century to the end of the Republic in 1797 by emphasizing lines of
research and working hypotheses that have emerged in the confrontation
between the central points of the “classical” historiography between the
2 James S. Grubb, “When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography,”
Journal of Modern History 58/1 (1986), 42–94.