Music played an essential part in raising the city of Venice and in founding the empire on which its fortunes would depend. This book focuses on a set of musical projects - played out in liturgy and civic ritual - that formed the city's history and framed and interpreted its unique material culture as it was in the process of taking shape. Jamie L. Reuland shows the state's most imaginative musical endeavors bound up with legal culture, stemming from the chancery's engines of historiography, or situated within the rich material environment of relics and reliquaries, mosaics and wall paintings, icons and statues. Arguing for music's technical ability to fabricate a sense of place and give form to history, Reuland recovers Venice's fascinating early propensity for a statecraft of the imagination, the consequences of which would be the better-known history of its material decay.

‘This is one of the most important and original books in medieval studies to appear in recent years. The history of music in Venice in the period from 1200 to 1400 has remained relatively unexplored until now. Reuland's discoveries show just how important a role music played in the political and colonial development of the city. The beautifully written book will be of equal interest to musicologists, historians, and art historians. A major tour de force.’

Anna Maria Busse Berger - University of California, Davis