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"A lively first-hand account of Florentine history in the lifetime of Dante and Giotto."--
Dino Campagni's classic chronicle gives a detailed account of a crucial period in the history of Florence, beginning about 1280 and ending in the first decade of the fourteenth century. During that time Florence was one of the largest cities in Europe and a center of commerce and culture. Its gold florin was the standard international currency; Giotto was revolutionizing the art of painting; Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti were transforming the vernacular love lyric. The era was marked as well by political turmoil and factional strife. The inexorable escalation of violence, as insult and reprisal led to arson and murder, provides the bitter content of Compagni's story. Dino Compagni was...
Publisher description
In Florence in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the essentially medieval values of the age of Dante were transformed into the intellectual attitudes characteristic of the early Renaissance. Mr Green examines this change as it was reflected in the works of the city's vernacular chroniclers. These merchant historians evolved out of the traditional universal chronicle of the Middle Ages an embryonic form of the modern history, exemplified at the beginning of the fifteenth century by the Istoria di Firenze of Goro Dati. In the course of this transition from chronicle to history, the world-view expressed by the chronicle - which assumed that all that happened contributed to a divinely inspired historical plan - yielded before a more selective conception of the significance of events as possible natural causes of change. At the same time, the ideals underlying the medieval sense of cosmic order, with their other worldly overtones, gave way before the more secular, humanist values of the emerging Renaissance.
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