Recent studies of the Italian Renaissance have emphasized the moral and cultural di-mensions of republicanism, but they have been chiefly based on the experience of Florence. Italy had, however, a second great urban re-public, and it is the major purpose of this book to relate Venice to the central concerns of Renaissance scholarship today. The book traces the development of the Venetian repub-lican consciousness through a series of stages, from the relatively backward and inarticulate early Venetian Renaissance to the rich and sophisticated political and historical compo-sitions of the later sixteenth and early seven-teenth centuries. The author shows how each phase in this development corresponded to the changing social and political circumstances of the Venetian Republic; and against this back-ground he studies the thought of a substantial group of Venetian writers whose importance in the elaboration and transmission of Renais-sance attitudes and values has been little recog-nized, among them Gasparo Contarini, Paolo Paruta, Enrico Davila, and Paolo Sarpi.