The Santa Maria di Firenze, the venerable Benedictine abbey located in the heart of Florence, is the subject of this book. Leader's richly illustrated, interdisciplinary study examines the abbey's history during the Renaissance.

The monastery of the Badia Fiesolana on the outskirts of Florence has often been seen as a secondary project of the Medici. However new research has shown that the family's involvement in its financial, cultural, intellectual, religious and artistic affairs is central to its development under Cosimo and Lorenzo de'Medici during the 15th century. In the remarkable setting of the Badia, where art and architectural structure was studied anew, erudite abbots encountered learned humanists. The proceedings of a conference held in 2013 shed new light on cultural and scholarly life in and around Florence. --

Churches and palaces in Florence have been the subject matter of book-length, often multi-volume studies over the centuries. This book is a compendium of the main churches in Florence and has been written with two distinct audiences in mind: English-speaking students of Renaissance art, architecture, literature and history and the well-read traveller to Florence who wishes to place the works of art and architecture into the wider context of Italian culture. The choice of churches discussed here was influenced by the author’s experience as teacher for several university programmes on site in Florence. The buildings described and analysed are those which students will most likely encounter in the course of their study-abroad stay in Florence, whether they wish to specialise in art, architecture or the history of the Florentine Renaissance. This book represents a textbook that offers concise information on the history, art, and architecture of 25 of the main Florentine churches, provides plans and photos of the façades, and introduces the student to some of the most important vocabulary and the main textual sources of the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

This book offers a major contribution for understanding the spread of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence. Investigating the connections between individuals who were part of the humanist movement, Maxson reconstructs the networks that bound them together. Overturning the problematic categorization of humanists as either professional or amateurs, a distinction based on economics and the production of original works in Latin, he offers a new way of understanding how the humanist movement could incorporate so many who were illiterate in Latin, but who nonetheless were responsible for an intellectual and cultural paradigm shift. The book demonstrates the massive appeal of the humanist movement across socio-economic and political groups, and argues that the movement became so successful and widespread because by the 1420s–30s the demands of common rituals began requiring humanist speeches. Over time, humanist learning became more valuable as social capital, which raised the status of the most learned humanists and helped disseminate humanist ideas beyond Florence.

A study of the Speziale al Giglio apothecary shop in fifteenth-century Florence, Italy.