| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

James E. Shaw. The Justice of Venice: Authorities and Liberties in the Urban Economy 1550–1700. (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy. 2006. Pp. x, 246. $65.00.

Justice is more than a bit player in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In Act IV, Shylock appears before the courts confident that the city's famed devotion to justice will deliver his suit in the form of a pound of the debtor Antonio's flesh. Despite the plot twist in which the accuser falls victim to the strictures of Venetian justice, his faith in the institution was not necessarily misplaced. As James B. Shaw demonstrates, Christians and Jews, men and women, citizens and foreigners, wealthy and working class alike benefited from a system that on some levels relied on flexibility and equity. The picture Shaw paints in this study of the Giustizia Vecchia, a lower-level magistracy with wide-ranging authority over the marketplace, and its clientele stresses malleability and accommodation over the centralizing tendencies of rigidity and punishment often accented in studies of early modern government and administration.

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