Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. This wide-ranging volume explores patrimony in legal thought and how family property was inherited, managed and shared legally and its central role in Renaissance Italy.

Drawing on a wide body of internationally-renowned scholars, including a core of Italians, this volume focuses on new material and puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. All stages of the judicial process are addressed, from the drafting of new laws to the rounding-up of bandits. Attention is paid both to common crime and to more historically specific crimes, such as sumptuary laws. Attempts to prevent or suppress disorder in private and public life are analysed, and many different types of crime, from the sexual to the political and from the verbal to the physical, are considered. In sum the volume aims to demonstrate the fundamental importance of crime and disorder for the study of the Italian Renaissance. It is the only single-volume treatment available of the subject in English. Other books have studied crime in a single city, or single types of crime, but few have presented a cross-section of articles which deploy diverse methodological approaches in material from many parts of the peninsula.

This book studies family life and gender broadly within Italy, not just one region or city, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Paternal control of the household was paramount in Italian life at this time, with control of property and even marital choices and career paths laid out for children and carried out from beyond the grave by means of written testaments. However, the reality was always more complex than a simple reading of local laws and legal doctrines would seem to permit, especially when there were no sons to step forward as heirs. Family disputes provided an opening for legal ambiguities to redirect property and endow women with property and means of control. This book uses the decisions of lawyers and judges to examine family dynamics through the lens of law and legal disputes.

The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy features original contributions by international scholars on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lauro Martines' Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, which is recognized as a groundbreaking study challenging traditional approaches to both Florentine and legal history. Essays by leading historians examine the professional, social, and political functions of Italian jurists from the thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. The volume also examines the use of emergency powers, the critical role played by jurists in mediating the rule of law, and the adjudication of political crimes. The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy provides both an assessment of Martines' pioneering archival scholarship as well as fresh insights into the interplay of law and politics in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.

There were shadows to the Italian Renaissance. Just as art and philosophy were flourishing, so too were darker practices, from murder-for-hire to prostitution. However, despite popular parallels between families like the Borgia and the Medici and the Mafia, there has been little systematic examination of the presence of organised crime in the era. In this short and lively essay, Mark Galeotti rereads and occasionally reinterprets the rich secondary literature to introduce a cast of corrupt princes, bandit chieftains, professional assassins, human traffickers, thugs and conmen and suggest that there were signs of the early beginnings of organised criminality in the towns and cities of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. An historian and political scientist, Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at New York University's SCPS Center for Global Affairs.

An investigation of the complex social and legal issues surrounding illegitimate offspring in Renaissance Florence