A01=Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan
Adriatic Sea
Author_Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan
Category=NHD
Doge
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Italian history
Lagoon City
Mediterranean history
Myth of Venice
Republic of Venice
Venetian commerce
Venetian history
Venice
Product details
- ISBN 9780801881893
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2005
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Perhaps more than in any other city, Venice has been shaped by its environment. The lagoon on which it was built isolated the city's inhabitants from mainland Europe, forcing them to look seaward for their survival and to establish a maritime empire that generated incalculable wealth, making Venice the envy of Renaissance Europe. In Venice Triumphant, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan provides a rich, multilayered history of Venice from Roman times to the sixteenth century. Instead of employing a rigidly chronological framework, she looks at the history of Venice thematically, focusing on the relationship between the city and its unique physical milieu in a way that emphasizes complexity and continuity. Central to Crouzet-Pavan's discussion is her concept of l'imaginaire, literally translated as "the imaginary" and here meaning the many symbolic terms Venetians created to describe and understand the peculiar space they inhabited and, by extension, themselves. One key example of l'imaginaire is Venetians' use of the term "the continent" to refer, somewhat dismissively, to Italy, Germany, and other lands beyond the lagoon in order to emphasize their own distinctive maritime identity.
As Crouzet-Pavan shows, this sense of exceptionalism impacts every aspect of Venetian history: its art and architecture; its involvement with mainland politics; its commercial, civic, and political institutions; and the shape of daily life in its homes, alleys, and courtyards. Elegantly translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Venice Triumphant offers a bold new perspective on the world's most beautiful-and remarkable-city.
Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan is a professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne. Her other books are Sopra le acque salse: Espaces, pouvoir et societe a Venise a la fin du Moyen Age (1992); La Mort lente de Torcello: Histoire d'une cite disparue (1994); Venise: Une invention de la ville, XIIIe-XVe siecle (1997); and Enfers et paradis: L'Italie de Dante et de Giotto (2001). Venice Triumphant, originally published in French in 1999, is her first book to be translated into English. Lydia G. Cochrane has translated three previous books for Johns Hopkins: On the Edge of the Cliff by Roger Chartier (1996), The Color of Melancholy by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (1997), and History of Suicide by Georges Minois (1999). Her other translations include Alain Boureau's The Lord's First Night (1998) and The Myth of Pope Joan (2001), and Renzo Dubbini's Geography of the Gaze (2002).
