Reviews for Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City

The average rating for Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-02-20 00:00:00 Lee Hoyle Re-read January 20, 2010. Just not as good as I remember it being. Assumes too much about the ideas of evangelicals and misleadingly inflates the numbers of heretics in the city. Seems to buy too much into Venetian rhetoric about such heretics while ignoring the fact that 676 people (p. 95) accused of evangelical heresy is just not that many and cannot be extrapolated to be that many in such a large population. Accounts well for the societal reasons that individuals might be attracted to the ideas that evangelism brought, but places too much emphasis on the centralizing Counter-Reformation state to explain why such ideas were eventually discarded. Might there not be a societal explanation for the rejection of evangelical ideas, when they were not only dangerous but also alienating in terms of the social relations it offered in a predominantly Catholic society?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-07 00:00:00 Steven Arbiz Mediocre book on the Crusades. The redeeming value is that the author added more material about the later Crusades and those in places outside the Levant.