With the playwright Angelo Beolco, aka Ruzante, as a focal point, this study sheds new light on his oeuvre, times, and Venetian patrician supporters by embedding the Venetian aspects of his life within the monumental changes taking place politically, economically, socially, and artistically. Linda Carroll uncovers a political grouping in the Venetian Republic in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that has heretofore gone unrecognized, the economic basis for it, and its expression in patronage of the arts.

Linda L. Carroll is Professor of Italian at Tulane University, USA. She is the author of numerous books and articles explicating the exceptionally but opaquely candid plays of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante), whose Prima oratione she has edited and translated. She is co-editor of Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy.