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As portraits, private diaries, and estate inventories make clear, elite families of the Italian Renaissance were obsessed with fashion, investing as much as forty percent of their fortunes on clothing. In fact, the most elaborate outfits of the period could cost more than a good-sized farm out in the Mugello. Yet despite its prominence in both daily life and the economy, clothing has been largely overlooked in the rich historiography of Renaissance Italy. In Dressing Renaissance Florence, however, Carole Collier Frick provides the first in-depth study of the Renaissance fashion industry, focusing on Florence, a city founded on cloth, a city of wool manufacturers, finishers, and merchants, of...
As portraits, private diaries, and estate inventories make clear, elite families of the Italian Renaissance were obsessed with fashion, investing as much as forty percent of their fortunes on clothing. In fact, the most elaborate outfits of the period could cost more than a good-sized farm out in the Mugello. Yet despite its prominence in both daily life and the economy, clothing has been largely overlooked in the rich historiography of Renaissance Italy. In Dressing Renaissance Florence, however, Carole Collier Frick provides the first in-depth study of the Renaissance fashion industry, focusing on Florence, a city founded on cloth, a city of wool manufacturers, finishers, and merchants, of...
Surveying the women painters, engravers and sculptors working in 16th and 17th century Italy, this text examines their artistic practices and achievements.
Ultimately, Cohn argues, women are the protagonists of this book, whether the issue is their support of other women or the resolution of conflict in the streets of Florence, the control of their own dowries or the salvation of their own souls.
Prevalent but long-neglected genres such as dialogue have recently been attracting attention in Renaissance studies. In view of the pervasive and varied nature of this genre's use in the European Renaissance, it has become crucial to widen the perspective so as to take into account more diverse approaches to this hybrid form. For this reason, Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée have assembled a broad collection of essays by international scholars that presents comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretical inquiry into this neglected area. The contributors ? who bring with them different linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds ? examine dialogue from a variety of perspect...
Vivid personal stories bring each topic to life and offer insights into human relations not only between rich and poor, powerful and weak, masters and servants, but also between parents and children, husbands and wives, and men and women."--BOOK JACKET.
Original essays by leading scholars on the significance of accessories in the cultural, social, and political lives of men and women in the Renaissance
In this groundbreaking book, Monica Chojnacka argues that the women of early modern Venice occupied a more socially powerful space than traditionally believed. Rather than focusing exclusively on the women of noble or wealthy merchant families, Chojnacka explores the lives of women—unmarried, married, or widowed—who worked for a living and helped keep the city running through their labor, services, and products. Among Chojnacka's surprising findings is the degree to which these working women exercised control over their own lives. Many headed households and even owned their own homes; when necessary, they also took in and supported other women of their families. Some were self-employed, while others had jobs outside the home. They often moved freely about the city to conduct business, and they took legal action in the courts on their own behalf. On a daily basis, Venetian women worked, traveled, and contested obstacles in ways that made the city their own.
Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bas...