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The history of the Florentine patriciate did not end with the establishment of the Medici Duchy and Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Proud and self-confident, these patricians were not subservient courtiers; on the contrary, they continued to exert a considerable influence on Florentine culture and politics for centuries. The patrician class in sixteenth-century Florence were the descendants of wealthy, sophisticated and politically savvy families who, while acquiring noble titles, estates, and villas, retained their long-standing urban identity. The mark they left on the city’s cultural and artistic life was embraced by the Medici, who used their political and diplomatic knowhow, eleborate artistic commissions, and European networks to enhance their power and prestige. A Cultural Symbiosis highlights the contributions to Florentine art and culture of eight patricians, focusing on the Valori, Pucci, Ridolfi, Vecchietti, del Nero, Salviati, Guicciardini, and Niccolini families.
This book highlights the close interactions between plants, plant knowledge, politics, and social life in Padua during the age of revolution. It explores the lives and thoughts of two brothers, the lawyer Andrea Meneghini and the botanist GiuseppeMeneghini, illustrating the unspoken dreams of progress and a new social order, but also sheds light on the ambiguous relationship between the Paduan elite and Austrian rule before the 1848 revolution. A closer look at park designs, gardening associations and networks, fl ower exhibitions, agricultural societies, organicist metaphors, and botanical research on the organization of living bodies opens up unexpected parallels between actors and ideas of two apparently distant areas: botany and political economy.
A comparative European perspective on aspects of nineteenth-century Italian politics and social history.
The world is full of traces of the past, ranging from things as different as monuments and factories to farms, eco-museums, landscapes, mountaineering and even woven-grass bridges. These traces must be protected and passed on to future generations. Communicational analysis shows that these traces have acquired the status of heritage by becoming communicative beings imbued with a new social life. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, granting this status was the prerogative of the state. New modes then emerged, increasingly involving social actors and the publicization of knowledge. Today, the heritage recognition of these traces also depends on interpretative schemes that circulate in society, notably through the media. Heritage Traces in the Making is aimed at anyone – researchers, professionals and students – who is interested in how heritage is created and how it evolves.
This book explores the benefits and challenges of transnational history for the study of modern Ireland. In recent years the word "transnational" has become more and more conspicuous in history writing across the globe, with scholars seeking to move beyond national and local frameworks when investigating the past. Yet transnational approaches remain rare in Irish historical scholarship. This book argues that the broader contexts and scales associated with transnational history are ideally suited to open up new questions on many themes of critical importance to Ireland’s past and present. They also provide an important means of challenging ideas of Irish exceptionalism. The chapters include...
Agricultural workers have long been underrepresented in labour history. This volume aims to change this by bringing together a collection of studies on the largest group of the global work force. The contributions cover the period from the early modern to the present – a period when the emergence and consolidation of capitalism has transformed rural areas all over the globe. Three questions have guided the approach and the structure of this volume. First, how and why have peasant families managed to survive under conditions of advancing commercialisation and industrialisation? Second, why have coercive labour relations been so persistent in the agricultural sector and third, what was the role of states in the recruitment of agricultural workers? Contributors are: Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Josef Ehmer, Katherine Jellison, Juan Carmona, James Simpson, Sophie Elpers, Debojyoti Das, Lozaan Khumbah, Karl Heinz Arenz, Leida Fernandez-Prieto, Rachel Kurian, Rafael Marquese, Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza, Rogério Naques Faleiros, Alessandro Stanziani, Alexander Keese, Dina Bolokan, and Janina Puder.
Eminent Italian historian Giovanni Levi once notably remarked that “no one is a Marxist anymore,” pointing to a paradox in Italian cultural history. While what is called "Marxism" was supposedly hegemonic over Italian culture, and especially history writing, for decades in the postwar period, it then seems to have suddenly disappeared. This study questions such a vision of a monolithic and hegemonic Marxism. It starts from the most effective anecdote to all ideologising narratives—that is, research into the texts themselves. It sees the Marxist historiography of the post-1945 period as a "history in the making," in which references to Marxian theory were a fundamental factor driving historiographical innovation. This allows the book to bring to light a highly original experience in the development of historiography, based on the long Italian tradition of reflection on historical knowledge.
In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. Agriculture has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This book, a comprehensive history of world agriculture during this period, explains how these feats were accomplished. Feeding the World synthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature. It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance: environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.
Traditionally grand ducal Tuscany and its cultural politics have been viewed through the lens of absolutism. Based on a wide range of newly found sources and building on recent revisionist scholarship, this study uses the universities of Pisa and Siena to expose the contradictions and the tensions which characterised the grand duchy. Setting the universities against the diplomatic, military, administrative, economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural development of the grand duchy, it shows how innovation mixed with tradition and local privileges were not only upheld but extended significantly.
Introduction : rethinking European kinship : transregional and transnational families / David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher -- The historical emergence and massification of international families in Europe and its diaspora / Jose C. Moya -- The medieval and early modern experience -- Mamluk and Ottoman political households : an alternative model of "kinship" and 'family' / Gabriel Piterberg -- From local signori to European high nobility : the Gonzaga family networks in the fifteenth century / Christina Antenhofer -- Property regimes and migration of patrician families in western Europe around 1500 / Simon Teuscher -- Trans-dynasticism at the dawn of the modern era : kinship dynamics amon...