Working women of early modern Venice Book

This book is a collection of translated excerpts from primary sources from the Renaissance golden age of the Venetian Republic, arranged thematically. I don't think I've ever read a book with quite this format. At the cost of obscuring the sense of historical change during the time period, it gives a clear synchronic picture of what the city was like. In a few sections the fragmentation made it easy to get lost in details, but in most the different sources complemented each other surprisingly well. Most are from bureaucratic records, but there are a variety of other kinds scattered here and there through the book. Picking, out of the many topics covered, a few that tie into my other recent reading: There are some chilling descriptions of famine and plague, and of the (literal) morality police - it sounds like they gave sex workers a hard time and gay men a worse one. The head of the government was a Doge, who held office for life but couldn't choose his successor, kind of like a secular Pope. Or not that secular - the leaders of the state and of the church might not always be on good terms, but political ceremonies always had a lot of religious (Catholic) content. My old frenemy Aretino from In the Company of the Courtesan shows up a few times in the section on art, telling his favorite architects and sculptors how great they are. The first line of defense against poverty was scuole, brotherhoods who pledged to help each other in case of emergency, which sounds like a remarkably rational way of doing things despite its religious framework and although it must not have always worked.