Marin Sanudo's Diaries

Sanudo, Marino, Patricia H. Labalme, and Laura Sanguineti White. Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

“No writer will ever make much of modern history who has not seen my diaries, within which is contained every event.” So wrote the Venetian historian Marino Sanudo (or Sanuto) in 1531. This book provides a wide-ranging selection of Sanudo’s large and largely-inaccessible writings in a superbly edited and annotated single volume. For those interested in the early Italian Wars and particularly the circumstances surrounding the shocking (at least to the Venetians) Venetian defeat at Agnadello (1509), this is a useful and interesting book.