A wide ranging survey of the political principles which underlay, or were used to justify, political proposals and decisions in Renaissance Italy.

Political life in Renaissance Italy was held together by political principles which underlay, or were used to justify, political proposals and decisions in practice. This wide-ranging comparative survey examines these political principles, as expressed in sources such as council debates, preambles to legislation and official correspondence, in the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century Italy. Focusing especially on the five republics - Florence, Venice, Genoa, Siena and Lucca - the book also considers princes and signori, and the principles underlying relations between states, particularly relations between major and minor powers. Many of the ideas articulated by those confronting practical political problems ranged beyond the questions dealt with in formal treatises of political thought and philosophy. Drawing on extensive archival research, Christine Shaw explores the relationship between 'reason and experience' in the conduct of political affairs in Renaissance Italy, and the gap between theory and practice.

This book offers a rich and exciting new way of thinking about the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a historical movement. Guido Ruggiero's work is based on archival research and new insights of social and cultural history and literary criticism, with a special emphasis on everyday culture, gender, violence, and sexuality. The book offers a vibrant and relevant critical study of a period too long burdened by anachronistic and outdated ways of thinking about the past. Familiar, yet alien; pre-modern, but suggestively post-modern; attractive and troubling, this book returns the Italian Renaissance to center stage in our past and in our historical analysis.

In this fascinating study, John Stephens inteprets the significance of the immense cultural change which took place in Italy from the time of Petrarch to the Reformation, and considers its wider contribution to Europe beyond the Alps. His important analysis (which is designed for students and serious general readers of history as well as the specialist) is not a straight narrative history; rather, it is an examination of the humanists, artists and patrons who were the instruments of this change; the contemporary factors that favoured it; and the elements of ancient thought they revived.

Dive into the rich tapestry that was the Italian Renaissance with this masterwork from Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Considered to be a seminal example of historiography of the era, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy plunges readers into an immersive experience of a uniquely significant period.

From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, humanism played a key role in European culture. Beginning as a movement based on the recovery, interpretation and imitation of ancient Greek and Roman texts and the archaeological study of the physical remains of antiquity, humanism turned into a dynamic cultural programme, influencing almost every facet of Renaissance intellectual life. The fourteen essays in this 1996 volume deal with all aspects of the movement, from language learning to the development of science, from the effect of humanism on biblical study to its influence on art, from its Italian origins to its manifestations in the literature of More, Sidney and Shakespeare. A detailed biographical index, and a guide to further reading, are provided. Overall, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism provides a comprehensive introduction to a major movement in the culture of early modern Europe.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... arrives, and after giving him the explanation quoted above of the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas on tyrannicide, exhorts him to bear death manfully. Boscoli makes answer: ' Father, waste no time on this; the philosophers have taught it me already; help me to bear death out of love to Christ.' What follows--the communion, the leave-taking and the execution-- is very touchingly described, one point deserves special mention. When Boscoli laid his head on the block, he begged the executioner to delay the stroke for a moment: ' During the whole time since the announcement of the sentence he had been striving after a close union with God, without attaining it as he wished, and now in this supreme moment he thought that by a strong effort he could give himself wholly to God.' It is clearly some half-understood expression of Savonarola which was troubling him. If we had more confessions of this character the spiritual picture of the time would be the richer by many important features which no poem or treatise has preserved for us. We should see more clearly how strong the inborn religious instinct was, how subjective and how variable the relation of the individual to religion, and what powerful enemies and competitors religion had. That men whose inward condition is of this nature, are not the men to found a new church, is evident; but the history of the Western spirit would be imperfect without a view of that fermenting period among the Italians, while other nations, who have had no share in the evolution of thought, may be passed over without loss. But we must return to the question of immortality. If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more highly cultivated natures, the reason lay partly in the fact that the great earthly...