Renaissance Venice is so much more than ‘just another’ research topic: Thoroughly demystified and much ‘reconsidered’ (Martin and Romano 2000), the Republic of St Mark and its multi-cultural, pluri-lingual, and poly-confessional society has been one of the main foci of academic attention for generations of scholars. The majority of studies, however, continue to focus on Venice proper and its diverse mercantile, political, or social groups while the studies whose outlook extends beyond Mestre or San Niccolò al Lido are far and few between.

In our panel(s) we aim to investigate Venice as a composite polity (Elliott 1992), that is, from a broad and comparative perspective that includes views both from and of the lagoon metropolis, the Terraferma, and the Stato da mar. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the different ways in which the inhabitants of Venice’s possessions conceived of their places within the entirety of the composite state. In so doing, we aim to address questions such as: How did the diverse cultural, political, and cultural actors within the Venetian state—e.g., artisans, clerics, humanists, and merchants—perceive their environment? What, if any, were the perceptive differences of nobles and non-nobles? How big were regional differences, and what role(s) did local traditions play? And, lastly, what about the different functions of the Serenissima’s diverse possessions that, at the height of Venice’s ‘Imperial Age’ (Chambers 1970), extended from the gates of Milan to the large islands of Crete and Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean?

We would like to invite paper proposals that focus on these and related issues throughout the Renaissance in order to comparatively assess the entire Republic of Venice. We are seeking proposals dealing with a wide range of topics, media, and sources that allow our panel(s) to transcend the narrow canals of the lagoon metropolis that will allow us to assess Venice and its territories as a composite state.

Papers from all disciplines will be considered. We are looking forward to your application: as per MSA guidelines your email should include the paper proposal (no more than 150-200 words), your contact information, affiliation, and a short CV (no longer than 300 words) in one file, preferably MS Word; submit the file(s) to Erin Maglaque (Oxford--erin.maglaque@oriel.ox.ac.uk) and Stephan Sander-Faes (Zürich--stephan.sander@hist.uzh.ch).