The essays in Venice Reconsidered offer a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchical, the scholars in this volume present a more fluid and complex interpretation of Venetian culture. Drawing on a variety of disciplines -- history, art history, and musicology -- these essays show that fundamental social categories such as nobility and citizenship were continually modified and renegotiated throughout the Republic's history. In particular, the study of women and nonelites complicates the more static images of Venice that once dominated the historiography. New analyses of Venice's rule of the terraferma have profoundly altered current perceptions of the Republic's political history and its legacies to the emerging Italian nation-state. Finally, through explorations of the meanings and functions of art, music, and architecture, these essays present innovative variants of the myth of Venice -- that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories Venetians told about themselves.