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Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle traces the history of Europe, Italy, and Florence over a vast sweep of time – from the Tower of Babel to the great earthquake of 1348. In the eleventh and twelfth books, Villani depicts a particularly eventful period in the history of Florence, whose grandeur is illustrated in several famous chapters describing the city’s income, expenses, and magnificence. The dramatic account follows Florence’s internal affairs as well as its conflicts with powerful lords like Castruccio Castracani and Mastino della Scala. The chronicler’s perspective, however, ranges beyond his city, as he documents such events as the imperial coronation of Louis of Bavaria, the penitential pilgrimage of Venturino da Bergamo, and the first campaigns of the Hundred Year’s War.
In Courtesy Lost, Kristina M. Olson analyses the literary impact of the social, political, and economic transformations of the fourteenth century through an exploration of Dante's literary and political influence on Boccaccio. The book reveals how Boccaccio rewrote the past through the lens of the Commedia, torn between nostalgia for elite families in decline and the need to promote morality and magnanimity within the Florentine Republic. By examining the passages in Boccaccio's Decameron, De casibus, and Esposizioni in which the author rewrites moments in Florentine and Italian history that had also appeared in Dante's Commedia, Olson illuminates the ways in which Boccaccio expressed his deep ambivalence towards the political and social changes of his era. She illustrates this through an analysis of Dante's and Boccaccio's treatments of the idea of courtesy, or cortesia, in an era when the chivalry of the declining aristocracy was being supplanted by the civility of the rising merchant classes.
This is a new translation of and commentary on Pico della Mirandola's most famous work, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. It is the first English edition to provide readers with substantial notes on the text, essays that address the work's historical, philosophical and theological context, and a survey of its reception. Often called the 'Manifesto of the Renaissance', this brief but complex text was originally composed in 1486 as the inaugural speech for an assembly of intellectuals, which could have produced one of the most exhaustive metaphysical, theological and psychological debates in history, had Pope Innocent VIII not forbidden it. This edition of the Oration reflects the spirit of the original text in bringing together experts in different fields. Not unlike the debate Pico optimistically anticipated, the resulting work is superior to the sum of its parts.
"We are living in Machiavellian times, argues Nathan Crick in The Way to Hell: Machiavelli for Catastrophic Times. Just as Machiavelli warned in the closing chapter of the Prince, a foreboding sense of catastrophe encroaches upon our daily lives from every corner - political, cultural, environmental, and viral, forces not unlike the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that were familiar characters in the daily lives of Machiavelli's Renaissance contemporaries, and which feature in the headlines that greet us every morning. Where catastrophe looms, Machiavelli inevitably follows. Drawing from the insights contained in Machiavelli's collected works, Crick interprets Machiavelli's political thought...
Examining images of gender and violence, this book analyzes selected works of three influential artists of the Irish cinema--Ford, Sheridan and Greengrass--whose careers, taken together, span the period from 1939 to the present. These three explore fundamental questions about identity, patriarchy and violence within Irish and Irish-American contexts, and in the process upset conventional notions of masculine authority. Furthermore, Ford's later films interestingly depart from the egalitarian ideals that distinguish his pre-World War II films.
Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new ...
This volume traces the work of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno, analyzing it through current methodological and theoretical frameworks. Questioning the current consensus, the book examines how the South as a cultural "other" began evolving over the fourteenth century, and reconsiders the nineteenth-century "Southern Question" concerning the Mezzogiorno’s history, culture and people and its lingering negative image in Europe and America. It also focuses on specific histories, authors and historiographical issues, and reviews how new understandings of the Mediterranean have begun to alter our perceptions of the South in a new global context and as the basis for new historical research.