The Limits of Identity: Early Modern Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representation of Difference. Karen-edis Barzman. Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe 7. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xvii + 316 pp. + 52 color pls. $167.
ments due to depression. While describing her bodily functions in great detail, he reveals that “she is extremely constipated, and when she evacuates without receiving any treatment, we rejoice as if she had given birth to a baby boy” (245). In another letter, her father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, is promised a red stone from a swallow’s stomach that he can sew under the left armpit of his jacket as a cure for joint pain. Another section contains the erotic description of a festive banquet in Constantinople. By the end of the sourcebook, the reader has been given a privileged view of life as it was experienced at the height of the Renaissance. For this reader, at least, the sourcebook goes beyond its modest aim to “illustrate the richness of diplomatic documents” to illuminate the craft of history itself (5–6). As each author mines the sources to explore a particular interest, the real show is not the source material itself, but rather the variety of ways historians have engaged with it. Italian Renaissance Diplomacy provides a vivid portrait of the old adage that what we bring to the source matters as much as what the source brings to us.