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Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official for military matters to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli's works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war. Lynch details Machiavelli's understanding of warfare in terms of both actual armed conflict and at the intellectual level of thinkers ...
People and goods from across the globe filled the vibrant ports of Genoa and Venice during the Renaissance. This book takes us onto the streets, bridges, and waterways of these significant, sensuous cities to reveal the ambitious schemes undertaken to promote the cleanliness and health of their communities. Along the way, we encounter a broad and fascinating cross-section of Renaissance society -- from courtesans to street food sellers and architects to canal diggers -- and, using new archival sources, uncover both the ideals and lived experiences of health and environmental management. During the Renaissance, vital connections were believed to exist between people's natures and those of the...
A timeless tale of love, lust, and politics, Tosca is one of the most popular operas ever written. In Tosca's Rome, Susan Vandiver Nicassio explores the surprising historical realities that lie behind Giacomo Puccini's opera and the play by Victorien Sardou on which it is based. By far the most "historical" opera in the active repertoire, Tosca is set in a very specific time and place: Rome, from June 17 to 18, 1800. But as Nicassio demonstrates, history in Tosca is distorted by nationalism and by the vehement anticlerical perceptions of papal Rome shared by Sardou, Puccini, and the librettists. To provide the historical background necessary for understanding Tosca, Nicassio takes a detailed...
The open access publication of this book has been made possible thanks to the International Institute of Social History – Amsterdam. Potosí (today Bolivia) was the major supplier for the Spanish Empire and for the world and still today boasts the world's single-richest silver deposit. This book explores the political economy of silver production and circulation illuminating a vital chapter in the history of global capitalism. It travels through geology, sacred spaces, and technical knowledge in the first section; environmental history and labor in the second section; silver flows, the heterogeneous world of mining producers, and their agency in the third; and some of the local, regional, ...
The century that followed the fall of Granada at the end of 1491 and the subsequent consolidation of Christian power over the Iberian Peninsula was marked by the introduction of anti-Arabic legislation and the development of hostile cultural norms affecting Arabic speakers. Yet as Spanish institutions of power first restricted and then eliminated Arabic language use, marginalizing Arabic-speaking communities, officially sanctioned translation to and from Arabic played an increasingly crucial role in brokering the administration of the growing Spanish empire and its overseas territories. The move on the peninsula from a regime of legal pluralism to one of religious and legal orthodoxy created...
Essays in Renaissance Thought and Letters is a volume dedicated to John Monfasani, renowned scholar of Latin and Greek rhetoric and philosophy. These essays range from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, in genre from learned notes to editiones principes, and in discipline from intellectual to socio-economic history. An introduction to Monfasani’s life and works, and a list of his opera open the volume. Contributors include Michael J.B. Allen, Sándor Bene, Concetta Bianca, Robert Black, Christopher Celenza, Brian Copenhaver, John Demetracopoulos, James Hankins, Martin Hinterberger, Thomas Izbicki, David Jacoby, Peter Mack, Lodi Nauta, David Rundle, David Rutherford, Chris Schabel, April Shelford, and Thomas M. Ward.
Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the ‘respublica litteraria’, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the hi...
Storing, Archiving, Organizing: The Changing Dynamics of Scholarly Information Management in Post-Reformation Zurich is a study of the Lectorium at the Zurich Grossmünster, the earliest of post-Reformation Swiss academies, initiated by the church reformer Huldrych Zwingli in 1523. This institution of higher education was planned in the wake of humanism and according to the demands of the reforming church. Scrutinizing the institutional archival records, Anja-Silvia Goeing shows how the lectorium’s teachers used practices of storing, archiving, and organizing to create an elaborate administrative structure to deal with students and to identify their own didactic and disciplinary methods. She finds techniques developing that we today would consider important to understand the history of information management and knowledge transfer.