You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute Notorious for his cleverness and daring, John Hawkwood was the most feared mercenary in early Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkwood began his career in France during the Hundred Years' War and crossed into Italy with the famed White Company in 1361. From that time until his death in 1394, Hawkwood fought throughout the peninsula as a captain of armies in times of war and as a commander of marauding bands during times of peace. He achieved international fame, and city-states constantly tried to outbid each other for his services, for which he received money, lan...
Ippolito II d’Este (1509-1572), cardinal and prince of Ferrara, played a crucial role in shaping the political and cultural connections between Italy and France. Seen by his contemporaries as staunchly ‘French’, his life rather followed a difficult balance between the political and spatial entities – Rome, Paris, and Ferrara – through which he continuously moved and from which he derived his power. Following his career as cardinal protector of the Valois crown, royal administrator of Siena on behalf of Henry II, and papal legate to France on the eve of the Wars of Religion, this book argues that Ippolito’s apparent diplomatic access ultimately weakened his family’s position in Italy and left it ill-equipped to compete in the changing politics of the peninsula.
Italy 1636 uses the French and Savoyard invasion of Spanish Lombardy in 1636 to explore the operation of early modern armies through a neo-Darwinian lens, uncovering the universal features of human behaviour and psychology as they relate to violence and war.
Stefano Dall’Aglio sheds new light on the notorious Florentine Lorenzino de’ Medici (also known as Lorenzaccio) and on two of the most infamous assassinations in Italian Renaissance history. In 1537 Lorenzino changed the course of history by murdering Alessandro de’ Medici, first duke of Florence, and paving the way for the accession of the new duke, Cosimo I. In 1548 Lorenzino was killed in Venice in revenge for the assassination. The events surrounding these murders, which Dall’Aglio reconstructs, involved the Medici, their loyalists, Florentine republican exiles, and some of the most powerful sovereigns of the time. The first publication in a century to examine the life of Lorenzino de’ Medici, and the first work in English, this fascinating revisionist history is based on extensive research in the historical archives of Florence and Simancas. The tale is as gripping as a detective novel, as Dall’Aglio unravels a 500-year-old mystery, revealing who was behind the bloody death of the duke’s assassin: the emperor Charles V.
In The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, two inquisitorial scholars, Black who has published on the institutional history of the Italian Inquisitions and Aron-Beller whose area of expertise are trials against Jews before the peripheral Modenese inquisition, jointly edit an essay collection that studies the relationship between the Sacred Congregation in Rome and its peripheral inquisitorial tribunals. The book analyses inquisitorial collaborations in Rome, correspondence between the Centre and its peripheries, as well as the actions of these sub-central tribunals. It discusses the extent to which the controlling tendencies of the Centre filtered down and affected the peripheries, and how the tribunals were in fact prevented by local political considerations from achieving the homogenizing effect desired by Rome.
International directory of archives / Annuaire international des archives.
This richly illustrated volume offers the most comprehensive and updated survey on about sixteen thousand Hebrew manuscript fragments reused as book-bindings and preserved in hundreds of libraries and archives in Italy. Contributions by the leading scholars in the field elucidate specific collections and genres no less than individual fragments, bringing to new life a forgotten library of medieval Jewish books, as almost 160 Talmudic codices, which include the Mishna, Tosefta, Palestinian Talmud and, for the most part, the Babylonian one, and several hitherto unknown texts. The contribution of these fragments to the ongoing research on the “European Genizah”, as the Books within Books Project, and to Jewish Studies in general cannot be overestimated.
Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), the religious reformer, preacher, and Florentine civic leader, was burned at the stake as a false prophet by the order of Pope Alexander VI. Tamar Herzig here explores the networks of Savonarola’s female followers that proliferated in the two generations following his death. Drawing on sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many never before studied, transcribed, or contextualized in Savonarolan scholarship and religious history, Herzig shows how powerful public figures and clerics continued to ally themselves with these holy women long after the prophet’s death. In their quest to stay true to their leader’s teachings, Savonarola’s fema...