Guido Ruggiero

A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance

This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship. Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive. Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective. Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite. Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.

Law and Punishment in Early Renaissance Venice

Fourteenth-century Venice was an unusual city, perhaps the wealthiest in Western Europe. It had a trading empire whose domain stretched from the Near East to the Atlantic. Individual entrepreneurs had even reached as far as China and in the process the merchant elite of Venice, who were legally recognized as nobles, had become collectively and individually some of the richest men in Europe. A balanced trade provided the main economic measure of their wealth; balanced, that is, between the long-distance trade of spices and other luxury products of the East and a short-distance trade in staples carried out over the extensive inland waterways of the Lombard plain. But Venice was unusual in more than its wealth. Politically, its merchant nobility-which formally took absolute control of government in the fourteenth century by enacting laws that allowed no one but members of their

Wayfarers in Wonderland: The Sexual Worlds of Renaissance Venice Revisited

The Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 provides a single volume overview of the most recent developments. It is organized thematically and covers a range of topics including political culture, economy, religion, gender, art, literature, music, and the environment. Each chapter provides a broad but comprehensive historical and historiographical overview of the current state and future directions of research.

Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power and the End of the Renaissance.

Mining the rich Venetian archives, especially the unusually detailed records of Venices own branch of the Roman Inquisition, Guido Ruggiero provides a strikingly new and provocative interpretation of the end of the Renaissance in Italy. In this boldly structured work, he develops five narrative accounts of individual encounters with the Inquisition that illustrate the double-edged metaphor of how passions were both bound by late Renaissance society and were seen in turn as binding people. In this way new perspectives are opened on magic, witchcraft, love, marriage, gender, and discipline at the level of the community and beyond. Witches, courtesans, prostitutes, women healers, nobles, Cardinals, and renegade priests and monks speak from these pages describing their lives, beliefs, hopes, fears, and lies. With an imaginative flair for storytelling and impeccable scholarship, Ruggiero exposes the rich complexity of the culture and poetics of the everyday at the end of the Renaissance and illuminates a previously unexplored chapter in Italian history.