Although he never matched Machiavelli’s or Guicciardini’s fame, Donato Giannotti (1492–1573) was one of the most influential political writers of the Italian Renaissance. His life and works have been investigated by scholars such as Roberto Ridolfi, Randoph Starn, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, among others. Since the early modern period, Giannotti’s reputation was tied to Della Repubblica de’Viniziani, a work that shaped the myth of Venice and the history of republicanism. Published in Rome in 1540 with a dedication to Francesco Nasi – one the leaders of the 1527 anti-Medici revolt – Della Repubblica de’Viniziani circulated throughout the Republic of Letters and was discussed by Jean Bodin and James Harrington. All previous scholarship has now been revolutionized by William J. Connell’s discovery of the manuscript of Giannotti’s Della Republica Ecclesiastica. Serendipitously recovered in an antique store in Amalfi, it has now become available in print for the first time. The work is of great interest not only to historians of the Italian Renaissance but to every scholar of the Reformation and political thought. Written in the 1540s and dedicated to the cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, Della Republica Ecclesiastica contains Giannotti’s ambitious plan of church reform. The bishops would have been elected by the clergy and the people, while the pope would have been stripped of his temporal powers in favor of the College of Cardinals (cfr. Chapter XVIII). The Cardinals would have served as the senate of an ideal republican government, which Giannotti modeled on Venice. In his rich introduction, Connell offers an exhaustive reading of Della Republica Ecclesiastica, recovering its sources, its publication history, and its place in sixteenth-century political thought. Drawing on Eusebius, Biondo Flavio, Platina, and Sabellico, Giannotti outlines a broad ecclesiastical history and traces the corruption of the church back to the Great Western Schism – precisely to the pontificate of Boniface IX – when the Papacy fully established its authority over Rome (cfr. Chapter V). Connell also convincingly demonstrates Giannotti’s contrast with the conciliarist tradition represented by Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, the other spokesman of the myth of Venice. Rather than through the council, Giannotti’s reform would have been achieved through an “Angelic Pope,” willing to hand over power to the Cardinals (cfr. Chapter XVIII). Such a plan, however, was destined to remain one of those “hopes that never materialized.”