In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies.J. Sperling, “The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 3–32, at p. 16. I am uneasy when historians (or anthropologists for that matter) insist that the “real” significance of what people said and did was inaccessible to them at the time, a position that might be described as methodological atheism and which is generally associated with functionalism (although Sperling's analysis is more like “dysfunctionalism”). By contrast, like Clifford Geertz, I would argue for methodological agnosticism. I do however entirely agree with Sperling that the “second serrata . . . institutionalized tensions between mutually exclusive requirements” (5), and that the paradoxes of Venetian political discourse were “both constitutive and destructive of the political system” (32). Sperling's approach can also be contrasted with S. Chojnacki, “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 12977mdash;1797, (J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Baltimore, 2000, 263–94), which sees patrician marriage legislation as part of a positive programme of self-definition. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.”Sperling's article includes full bibliographic references to the literature on the “myth of Venice.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.