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A new history of one of the foremost printers of the Renaissance explores how the Age of Print came to Italy. Lorenz Bninger offers a fresh history of the birth of print in Italy through the story of one of its most important figures, Niccol di Lorenzo della Magna. After having worked for several years for a judicial court in Florence, Niccol established his business there and published a number of influential books. Among these were Marsilio FicinoÕs De christiana religione, Leon Battista AlbertiÕs De re aedificatoria, Cristoforo LandinoÕs commentaries on DanteÕs Commedia, and Francesco BerlinghieriÕs Septe giornate della geographia. Many of these books were printed in vernacular...
This volume celebrates John M. Najemy and his contributions to the study of Florentine and Italian Renaissance history. Over the last three decades, his books and articles on Florentine politics and political thought have substantially revised the narratives and contours of these fields. They have also provided a framework into which he has woven innovative new threads that have emerged in Renaissance social and cultural history. Presented by his many students and friends, the essays aim to highlight his varied interests and to suggest where they may point for future studies of Florence and, indeed, beyond. -- Amazon.com.
After the State and the Church, the most well organized membership system of medieval and early modern Europe was the confraternity. In cities, towns, and villages it would have been difficult for someone not to be a member of a confraternity, the recipient of its charity, or aware of its presence in the community. In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, Konrad Eisenbichler brings together an international group of scholars to examine confraternities from various perspectives: their origins and development, their devotional practices, their charitable activities, and their contributions to literature, music, and art. The result is a picture of confraternities as important venues for the acquisition of spiritual riches, material wealth, and social capital. Contributors to this volume: Alyssa Abraham, Davide Adamoli, Christopher F. Black, Dominika Burdzy, David D’Andrea, Konrad Eisenbichler, Anna Esposito, Federica Francesconi, Marina Gazzini, Jonathan Glixon, Colm Lennon, William R. Levin, Murdo J. MacLeod, Nerida Newbigin, Dylan Reid, Gervase Rosser, Nicholas Terpstra, Paul Trio, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Beata Wojciechowska, and Danilo Zardin.
In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.
Based on three hundred civil and criminal cases over four centuries, Elizabeth W. Mellyn reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. In some of these cases, solutions were protective and palliative; in others, they were predatory or abusive. The goals of families were sometimes at odds with those of the courts, but for the most part families and judges worked together to order households and communities in ways that served public and private interests. For most of the period Mellyn examines, Tuscan communiti...
The innovative city culture of Florence was the crucible within which Renaissance ideas first caught fire. With its soaring cathedral dome and its classically-inspired palaces and piazzas, it is perhaps the finest single expression of a society that is still at its heart an urban one. For, as Brian Jeffrey Maxson reveals, it is above all the city-state – the walled commune which became the chief driver of European commerce, culture, banking and art – that is medieval Italy's enduring legacy to the present. Charting the transition of Florence from an obscure Guelph republic to a regional superpower in which the glittering court of Lorenzo the Magnificent became the pride and envy of the continent, the author authoritatively discusses a city that looked to the past for ideas even as it articulated a novel creativity. Uncovering passionate dispute and intrigue, Maxson sheds fresh light too on seminal events like the fiery end of oratorical firebrand Savonarola and Giuliano de' Medici's brutal murder by the rival Pazzi family. This book shows why Florence, harbinger and heartland of the Renaissance, is and has always been unique.
In the Early Modern period, the religious refugee became a constant presence in the European landscape, a presence which was felt, in the wake of processes of globalization, on other continents as well. During the religious wars, which raged in Europe at the time of the Reformation, and as a result of the persecution of religious minorities, hundreds of thousands of men and women were forced to go into exile and to restore their lives in new settings. In this collection of articles, an international group of historians focus on several of the significant groups of minorities who were driven into exile from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The contributions here discuss a broad range of topics, including the ways in which these communities of belief retained their identity in foreign climes, the religious meaning they accorded to the experience of exile, and the connection between ethnic attachment and religious belief, among others.
This book presents a new perspective on the Italian Renaissance court by examining the circulation, collection and exchange of art objects.
To provide a view of the history of western rhetoric, this volume presents original articles by a number of world-renowned scholars representing different countries and varying viewpoints. In discussing the status of the historical perspectives on rhetoric, these international scholars also present a tribute to James J. Murphy, whose scholarship and service did much to shape the field. The book will introduce new insights into western European rhetoric and its connections with English rhetoric.