Short list of recommended resources for Venice: Queen of the Adriatic

Elizabeth Horodowich has written a short and very readable summary, A Brief History of Venice: A New History of the City and Its People (2009, pb, 230pp), which includes brief references to the physical remains from each period that may still be seen today when visiting the city.  Somewhat denser is William H. McNeill’s Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797 (originally published in 1974, reissued in 2009, pb, 323pp), which focuses more attention on Venice’s relations with the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and the emerging European powers.  If art is your primary focus, Patricia Fortini Brown’s Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (2005, pb, 176pp) provides historical and social context along with excellent illustrations.  Jan Morris originally wrote her impressionistic portrait of Venice fifty years ago, but has revised it several times for later editions. It is currently available as Venice in Kindle (2008, 336pp) and Audiobook (2010, 5:16 hours) formats, and in book form as The World of Venice (1995, pb, 320pp).  Our featured speaker for the Friday evening program (Oct. 22), Joanne Ferraro, provides an unusual perspective on Venice’s social history and the role of women in Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (2001, 240pp, also available in Kindle), based on her examination of court records of marital disputes.

Remember, if you are ordering any of these books (or anything else) from Amazon, you can help Humanities West by ordering through our Amazon Affiliates link.  We get 4-6% of your purchase price, at no additional cost to you.  Just one additional click.

Historical fiction set in Venice

Humanities West programs offer a kind of cross-disciplinary immersion in some particularly interesting historical setting.  Another way to add a dimension to that immersive experience is through historical fiction that shares a similar historical and cultural setting.  Although you may have to sift through some schlocky (and wildly inaccurate) works that are simply looking for an exotic background, good historical fiction is meticulously researched and goes to great lengths to recreate the atmosphere, the look-and-feel, and even the psychological mindset of its period.  A fictionalized plot, set against a backdrop that often includes real historical places, events and personalities, can bring a distant period to life in a way that few works of straight history are able to do.

It should come as no surprise that Venice, the focal point of our Oct. 22-23 program, has figured prominently in many works of historical fiction.  But where to start?  It turns out that there is an excellent web site called Historical Tapestry.  "We are a group of readers who love to read Historical Fiction set in all eras. Historical Tapestry is exclusively devoted to Historical Fiction."

In response to a request for information about works set in Venice, the folks at Historical Tapestry have compiled a list organized by historical period, with the bulk of the works set in the 15th and 16th centuries.  While I can't claim to have read all these books, based on a perusal of Amazon summaries and reviews, it looks like Elle Newmark's The Book of Unholy Mischief or Thomas Quinn's The Lion of St. Mark might be good places to start.  The Newmark book is also available in Kindle and Audiobook formats.

Feel free to add your own recommendations or critiques if you are familiar with these or any other works of historical fiction set in Venice.

Agora: a film about Alexandria, astronomy, and a woman of science

Agora is not your typical summer blockbuster.  You may even have trouble finding a theater where it is currently playing.  But the movie is centered on some themes that will undoubtedly resonate with fans of Humanities West, especially those who attended last season's programs about astronomy (in October 2009) and Alexandria (in February 2010). 

This is the story of Hypatia, the brilliant female philosoper, mathematician, and astronomer, who lived and taught in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth century, when Alexandria was being torn apart by factional strife between the Hellenistic pagans, the Jews, and the rapidly rising Christians.  Hypatia, who has been called "the last of the Hellenes", had a devoted following that included members of all three cultural strands, but her dedication to a life of reason and empirical skepticism brought her increasingly into conflict with the faith-based fanaticism of the Christians, who eventually destroyed the multi-cultural cosmopolitanism that had made Alexandria the cultural and scholarly center of Mediterranean civilization for centuries.  The brutal public murder of Hypatia by an organized mob of Christian militants in 415 AD may also be seen as the symbolic end of the Hellenistic era that our program celebrated.  (The image below is from Raphael's School of Athens.)

The film's depiction of factional strife in Alexandria, although sometimes uncomfortably graphic, seems to follow historical accounts rather accurately.  Its re-creation of ancient Alexandria and of everyday life in the streets, as well as in the scholarly precincts of the Library, are impressive and convincing.  The film also depicts Hypatia's intellectual struggle to challenge the assumptions of the dominant geocentric model of Ptolemaic astronomy, and replace it with a simpler, more elegant heliocentric model, a theory that would take more than a thousand years (and the invention of the telescope) to gain widespread acceptance.  This account is credible (based on Hypatia's scholarly accomplishments and on the existence of competing heliocentric theories in the Greek tradition), but is also highly speculative, since little direct evidence of her work survived.

If you enjoy historical dramatizations, this film is worth seeing.  If you are unable to find it in a theater, the DVD can be pre-ordered through Netflix or Amazon, although it will apparently not be available until later this Fall.