Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice's Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean.

Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice's Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making. Venice's Intimate Empire thus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families' experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians' relationships to empire—its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures—were determined.

Erin Maglaque is Associate Lecture of early modern European history at the University of St. Andrews.

Erin Maglaque's Venice's Intimate Empire: Family Life and Scholarship in the Renaissance Mediterra- nean weaves a dense narrative tapestry that recounts the lives of two sixteenth-century Venetians and their families...Maglaque's book nonetheless reveals to us what can be gleaned from studying "ordinary" individuals.

Maglaque's book is a distinguished contribution to Venetian studies and a delight to read.

Venice's Intimate Empire is a rich read, offering insights of various sorts on page after page. It will reward the patient reader, who, it is to be hoped, will think things through in contexts other than the narrowly Venetian and to see parallels in the other communities of Italy and in the social, economic, and cultural developments there.

Successfully integrates social and intellectual history while adding new ideas for both groups of historians to ponder. In approach and presentation; it resembles a very good microhistory that takes seriously the saturation of humanist learning in both its subjects and the broader early 16th century.