Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Volume 16)

Studies on the History of Society and Culture

by John Jeffries Martin

How could early modern Venice, a city renowned for its political freedom and social harmony, also have become a center of religious dissent and inquisitorial repression? To answer this question, John Martin develops an innovative approach that deftly connects social and cultural history. The result is a profoundly important contribution to Renaissance and Reformation studies.
Martin offers a vivid re-creation of the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics--those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform and whose ideologies ranged from evangelical to anabaptist and even millenarian positions. In exploring the connections between religious beliefs and social experience, he weaves a rich tapestry of Renaissance urban life that is sure to intrigue all those involved in anthropological, religious, and historical studies--students and scholars alike.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 1993

About the author

John Jeffries Martin, Chair of the Department of History, is a historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004). In addition, he is the editor or co-editor of several volumes: Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State (2002); The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (2002); Heresy, Culture and Religion in Early Modern Italy: Contexts and Contestations (2006); and The Renaissance World (2007) as well as some fifty articles and essays. He is currently completing the first volume of Europe's Providential Modernity, 1492-1792, a work that offers a new interpretation not only of Europe in the early modern period but a rethinking of modernity itself. Martin’s further research focuses on the history of torture in early modern Italy, a topic he is pursuing through a study of Francesco Casoni, a provincial intellectual, whose writings on evidence and the art of conjecture did much to undermine the need for the use of torture in the courts of Europe in the early modern period.

Martin has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, twice of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and has received support for his research from the American Philosophical Association, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America. He has lectured, as the Alphonse Dupront Chair, at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and, as Distinguished Visiting Scholar, at Victoria College, the University of Toronto. He also lectures frequently to broader publics, most recently through a series of presentations on early modern Europe through the Program in the Humanities and Human Values at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

With Richard Newhauser, Martin is editor of the series Vices & Virtues for Yale University Press. Martin teaches courses in Italian and European history. His most recent courses include a graduate seminar on the history of the early modern Mediterranean and an undergraduate seminar on the history of torture in the West. In the spring of 2013 he offered, together with Sara Galletti, a course entitled “Mapping Knowledge in the Renaissance: Raphael’s School of Athens,” a collaborative that investigated the epistemologies of various disciplines in Rome in the High Renaissance. The course was funded by a grant from the Humanities Writ Large initiative at Duke.

Before joining the history faculty at Duke in 2007, Martin taught at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he also served as Chair of the History Department (2004-2007). Martin grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia, attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard.

Reviews

[David]

"Accompanied by a priest or two, officers from the night watch would row the condemned man out of the lagoon and into the Adriatic before dawn. They, they would mutter a few prayers and drop the heretic, who was weighted with a stone, into the sea."
I love studying history so much.

[Cali · Rating 4 out of 5]

To send heretics to the sea, then, was to recognize this duality. For it was precisely because heretics so threatened the identity of the republic and because they abused the openness of the city and polluted it, that the sea became the most fitting means of purifying the republic—protecting the community from the menace that heresy represented. The drownings, therefore, embodied an exquisite logic. The waters that made Venice the Catholic and maritime republic it was would also kill to keep Venice pure and to keep the community prosperous and united.

a useful comparative study of local religious politics in sixteenth-century Venice.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Re-read January 20, 2010. Just not as good as I remember it being. Assumes too much about the ideas of evangelicals and misleadingly inflates the numbers of heretics in the city. Seems to buy too much into Venetian rhetoric about such heretics while ignoring the fact that 676 people (p. 95) accused of evangelical heresy is just not that many and cannot be extrapolated to be that many in such a large population. Accounts well for the societal reasons that individuals might be attracted to the ideas that evangelism brought, but places too much emphasis on the centralizing Counter-Reformation state to explain why such ideas were eventually discarded. Might there not be a societal explanation for the rejection of evangelical ideas, when they were not only dangerous but also alienating in terms of the social relations it offered in a predominantly Catholic society?