An authoritative and accessible survey of the European nobility over four centuries.

A history of Venice from the earliest times - Crusades - Ships and navigation - Byzantine and Gothics - Humanism - Renaissance - Merchant shipping - Scuole.

The decline of Venice remains one of the classic episodes in the economic development of modern Europe. Its contrasts are familiar enough: the wealthiest commercial power in fifteenth-century Europe, the strongest western colonial power in the eastern Mediterranean, found its principal fame three centuries later in carnival and the arts. This metamorphosis from commercial hegemony to fashionable pleasure and landed wealth was, however, a complex process. It resulted not so much from the Portuguese voyages of discovery at the beginning of the sixteenth century as from increasing Dutch adn English competition at its end, and from industrial competition chiefly from beyond the Mediterranean. Several of the Articles Dr Pullan has chosen to illustrate these changes are made available in English for the first time, and two have been revised for this book. Four deal with the fortunes of entrepot trade and shipbuilding, which had furnished the basis of Venetian wealth adn influence in the Middle Ages; four others expamine the new fields of enterprise which Venice explored in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which helped to compensate for the decline in traditional activities. This classic book was first published in 1968.

No other work on Galileo Galilei has brought together such a complete description of the historical context in its political, cultural, philosophical, religious, scientific, and personal aspects as this volume has done. In addition to covering the whole of Galileo's life, it focuses on those things that are most pertinent to the Galileo Affair, which culminated in his condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633. It also includes an extensive discussion of the relationship between religion and science in general, and of the relationship between Christianity and science in particular, without which a true understanding of the affair is much weakened. This discussion of the relationship of Christianity with science-a long, generally positive relationship-is most timely since the case of Galileo is, as many historians and Pope Benedict XVI have stated, the beginning of the alienation of the Church from much of the intellectual culture of our present age. The "warfare between science and religion" is an old myth that should finally be retired, but for many it is still axiomatic. This work shows the significance of astrology in the history of society and the Church (Galileo was a master astrologer), and the importance of the internal tensions and factions within the Roman Curia in the seventeenth century. It also tells of the profound battles among Church leadership over the direction of the Church in a time of uncertainty and intellectual and cultural ferment. The Galileo Affair is not just of its time and place, and it is not just about Galileo, but it touches upon that perennial issue of how the Church deals with issues of adaptation and change.