Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City

Martin, John Jeffries

ISBN 10: 0801878772 / ISBN 13: 9780801878770

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801878772
• ISBN 13: 9780801878770
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association

Renaissance Venice is generally portrayed as a city of harmony and consensus. This book offers a sharply different view by highlighting the history of religious dissent in this early modern city. Drawing on sixteenth-century records from archives of the Roman Inquisition, John Jeffries Martin reconstructs the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics―those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform. Among them were Evangelists, Protestants, Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, and Millenarians, whose ideologies ranged from moderate to radical. The protagonists included men and women from all social classes; but artisans, above all those in the elite crafts, proved especially likely to give their support to the new reform ideas. Martin's analysis, which explores the interconnections of religious beliefs and social experience, offers new perspectives on the Italian Reformation and demonstrates widespread persistent popular support for this reform of church and society well after the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in the 1540s.

About the Author

John Jeffries Martin is a professor of history at Trinity University, the editor of The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad and co-editor of Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, also available from Johns Hopkins.