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

"Martin has given us in this exquisitely written and elegantly published volume nothing less than a fully integrated humanistic model of history... He views his subject through both wide-angle and close-up lenses with enough illumination to leave the reader bedazzled."

"Martin offers an elegant, undogmatic, and beautifully written account of three currents of heresy that flowed through sixteenth-century Venice."

"This insightful study of municipal culture and the interaction of religion, social forces, and political programs and institutions belongs in all college, university, and seminary libraries."

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.