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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...
'The Talk of the Town' explores everyday communication in a 16th-century small town and the role it played in the circulation of information across and within early modern communities, using the notebooks of the St Gall linen trader Johannes Rütiner to gain unusual insights into an oral world, and show how conversation could shape society.
The social historian, searching for the basis of a culture, often turns to a study of ordinary people. Perhaps one of the most revealing places to find them is in a court of law. In this presentatoin of nine criminal trials of sixteenth-century Rome (1540-75), where magistrates kept verbatim records, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen paint a lively portrait of a society, one that is reminiscent of Boccaccio. These stories, however, are true. Each trial transcript is followed by an essay that interprets the beliefs, codes, everyday speech, and personal transactions of a world that is radically different from our own. The people on trial include assassins, a spell-caster, an exorcist, an adulterous wife, several courtesans, and the peasant cast of a bawdy, sacrilegious play. Out of their often pognant troubles, and their machinations, comes a vivid revelation of not only the tumultuous street life of Rome but also rituals of honour, the power and weakness of women, and the realities of social and economic hierarchies. Like cinema-verite, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome gives us an intimate glimpse of a people and their world.
Discover what life was like for ordinary people in Renaissance Italy through this unique resource that paints a full portrait of everday living.
Roman Tales: A Reader’s Guide to the Art of Microhistory explores both the social and cultural life of Renaissance Rome and the mind-set and methods of microhistory. This book draws the reader deep into eight stories: a Christian-Jewish picnic plus an ill-aimed stone fight, an embassy-driven attack on Rome's police, a magic prophetic mirror, an immured mad hermit, a stolen dwarf, and the bizarre misadventures of a stolen roll of velvet, a truly odd elopement, and a thieving child who treats his cronies to dinner at the inn. It meditates on the resources and lacunae that shape the telling of these stories and, through them, it models an historical method that contrives to turn the limits of...
Sheds new light on how masculinity was understood, lived, performed and viewed during a period of huge change. Premodern masculinity was multivalent and dynamic, a series of intersecting, conflicting, and mutating identities that nevertheless were distinct and recognizable to people and their societies. The articles collected here examine a variety of means by which masculinity was constructed, deconstructed, and transformed across time, geographies, and cultures. Articles range across the twelfth to seventeenth century, from western Europe to the Volga-Ural region, from the Christian west to the Muslim east, from Ottomans to Mongols and Persians, from Baudri of Bourgueil to Blaise de Monluc; while topics include the chivalric hero, the effeminate man, beards, and spurs, represented variously in literature, historical documents, and art. Finally, in that period of great transformation that is the sixteenth century, they show how masculinity moved away from the traditional and recognizable to become something different and distinct from its premodern expressions.
Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many c...
Disputes, discord and reconciliation were fundamental parts of the fabric of communal living in early modern Europe. This edited volume presents essays on the cultural codes of conflict and its resolution in this period under three broad themes: peacemaking as practice; the nature of mediation and arbitration; and the role of criminal law in conflicts. Through an exploration of conflict and peacemaking, this volume provides innovative accounts of state formation, community and religion in the early modern period.
Julia Rombough explores the regulation of sound in women's residential institutions in early modern Florence. Silence was tied to ideals of feminine purity and spiritual discipline, yet enclosed women still laughed, shouted, sang, and conversed. A Veil of Silence offers a revealing history of the political and spiritual meanings of the senses.
Generations of tourists visiting Rome have ventured into the small section between the Tiber River and the Capitoline Hill whose narrow, dark streets lead to the charming Fountain of the Tortoises, the brooding mass of the Palazzo Cenci, and some of the best restaurants in the city. This was the site of the Ghetto, within whose walls the Jews of Rome were compelled to live from 1555 until 1870. Kenneth Stow, leading authority on Italian Jews, probes Jewish life in Rome in the early years of the Ghetto. Jews had been residents of Rome since before the days of Julius Caesar, but the 16th century brought great challenges to their identity and survival in the form of Ghettoization. Intended to e...