| Description: |
Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (Published in Association With the American
Numismatic Society) by Alan M. Stahl
Hardcover, purple cloth: XV, 497 pages, illustrated
through with many illustrations and figures; Dimensions (in inches): 1.31 x 9.47 x 6.43
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore/London; ANS, New York; (February
2001) , ISBN: 080186383X
Book Description
Within a few months of assuming the position
of curator of medieval coins at the American Numismatic Society in 1980, Alan M. Stahl was
presented with a plastic bag containing a hoard of 5,000 recently discovered coins, most
of which turned out to be from medieval Venice. The course of study of that hoard (and a
later one containing more than 14,000 coins) led him to the Venetian archives, where he
examined thousands of unpublished manuscripts. To provide an even more accurate account of
how the Zecca mint operated in Venice in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, Stahl
commissioned scientific analyses of the coins using a variety of modern techniques,
uncovering information about their content and how they had been manufactured. The
resulting book, Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages, is the first to examine the
workings of a premodern mint using extensive research in original documents as well as
detailed study of the coins themselves.
The first of the book's three sections traces
the coinage of Venice from its origins in the ninth century as a minor, and unofficial,
regional Italian coinage to its position at the dawn of the Renaissance as the dominant
currency of Mediterranean trade. The second section, entitled "The Mint in the Life
of Medieval Venice," illustrates the mechanisms of the control of bullion and the
strategies for mint profit and explores the mint's role in Venetian trade and the
emergence of a bureaucratized government. The third section, "Within the Mint,"
examines the physical operations that transformed raw bullion into coins and identifies
the personnel of the mint, situating the holders of each position in the context of their
social and professional backgrounds.
Illustrated with photos of Venetian coinage from
the world's major collections, Zecca also includes a listing of all holders of offices
related to the medieval Venetian mint and summaries of all major finds of medieval
Venetian coins.
About the Author Alan M. Stahl served for twenty years as the curator of
medieval coins for the American Numismatic Society, and is currently a visiting professor
in the department of history at the University of Michigan. His previous books include The
Merovingian Coinage of the Region of Metz and The Venetian Tornesell A Medieval Colonial
Coinage. |
