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Guardians of Republicanism analyses the political and intellectual history of Renaissance Florence-republican and princely-by focusing on five generations of the Valori family, each of which played a dynamic role in the city's political and cultural life. The Valori were early and influential supporters of the Medici family, but were also crucial participants in the city's periodic republican revivals throughout the Renaissance. Mark Jurdjevic examines their political struggles and conflicts against the larger backdrop of their patronage and support of the Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, the radical Dominican prophet Girolamo Savonarola, and Niccolò Machiavelli, the premier political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Each of these three quintessential Renaissance reformers and philosophers relied heavily on the patronage of the Valori, who evolved an innovative republicanism based on a hybrid fusion of the classical and Christian languages of Florentine communal politics. Jurdjevic's study thus illuminates how intellectual forces-humanist, republican, and Machiavellian-intersected and directed the politics and culture of the Florentine Renaissance.
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...
Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy is the first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on over 100 contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo's diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. Cohn finds new develop...
A study of a religious organization for youths (aged 13-14) founded in Florence in 1411 that is firmly grounded on archival and contemporary documents, and covers a variety of fields of interest.
This book presents a study of humanism, theology, and politics in Florence during the last decades of the fifteenth century. It considers the relations between humanists and theologians and between humanism and religion. Modern scholarship on humanism has not taken sufficient account of the deep interest shown by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) in theology and religion. This book presents a detailed and innovative account of Ficino’s De Christiana religione (1474) and of Pico’s Apologia (1487), in the context of explaining the evolution of a humanist theology. The book ends with a consideration of the stormy events of the 1490s, when Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) became a leading spiritual and political figure in Florentine public life.
Girolamo Savonarola, the fifteenth-century doom-saying friar, embraced the revolution of the Florentine republic and prophesied that it would become the center of a New Age of Christian renewal and world domination. This new biography, the culmination of many decades of study, presents an original interpretation of Savonarola's prophetic career and a highly nuanced assessment of his vision and motivations.Weinstein sorts out the multiple strands that connect Savonarola to his time and place, following him from his youthful rejection of a world he regarded as corrupt, to his engagement with that world to save it from itself, to his shattering confession--an admission that he had invented his prophesies and faked his visions. Was his confession sincere? A forgery circulated by his inquisitors? Or an attempt to escape bone-breaking torture? Weinstein offers a highly innovative analysis of the testimony to provide the first truly satisfying account of Savonarola and his fate as a failed prophet.
An account of the astrological controversies that arose in Renaissance Italy in the wake of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, published in 1496.
The age of princes has passed, but the age of politicians is at its heights. So is Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince any less relevant? No. But it needs an update, to reflect the political realities of our times. That is the purpose of this groundbreaking manuscript—a guide to success in contemporary politics, where the democratically-elected politician has assumed the role of the classical prince. Here is revealed how a politician must act if she wants to be successful, how she must plot her every move, whether dealing with colleagues, constituents, family members, bureaucrats, lobbyists or the media. Indeed, this manuscript is unique, for it exposes at a level of detail never seen before the inner workings of the mind of the contemporary politician. And while it may prove an asset to aspiring politicians, its frank and honest nature will no doubt strike fear in the hearts of incumbent politicians as it sheds light on their motives, intentions, and aspirations.
Celebrated at the heart of a notoriously unstable period, the Vacant See, papal funerals in early modern Rome easily fell prey to ceremonial chaos and disorder. Charged with maintaining decorum, papal Masters of Ceremonies supervised all aspects of the funeral, from the correct handling of the papal body to the construction of the funeral apparato: the temporary decorations used during the funeral masses in St Peter?s. The visual and liturgical centre of this apparato was the chapelle ardente or castrum doloris: a baldachin-like structure standing over the body of the deceased, decorated with coats of arms, precious textiles and hundreds of burning candles. Drawing from printed festival book...
Spiritual ideals in early modern Europe shaped political and social poor relief structures just as much as rationalization and effective administration colored ecclesiastical charity efforts. Thomas Max Safley examines the roles of the community in responding to poverty, whatever the context: religious, political, or private (the elite).