No previous work has examined political exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence or its significance for the transition from Florentine popular government to oligarchy. Between the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century, political exclusion became a normal feature of political life, regardless of the type of political regime; it was an essential instrument by which new governments consolidated their control over the city and the countryside in one of the largest and most powerful cities of Early Renaissance Europe. Exclusion from the Republic of Florence-separation from friends and family, business and property, coupled with the degradation of public humiliation-engendered a new outlook on life. In Early Renaissance Florence, excluded citizens across social classes became common outlaws, no different for common criminals prosecuted for heresy, blasphemy, gambling, or sexual deviance. By investigating these practices and attitudes of Early Renaissance Florence, this book shows the dark side of Renaissance republicanism: its fear of political dissent in any form and its means to crush it at all costs. This study of the other side of Renaissance republicanism presents a new and crucial chapter in Renaissance history.

Professor Brucker contends that changes in the social order provide the key to understanding the transition of Florence from a medieval to a Renaissance city. In this book he shows how Florentine politics were transformed from corporate to elitist. He bases his work on a thorough examination of archival material, providing a full socio-political history that extends our knowledge of the Renaissance city-state and its development. The author describes the restructuring of the political system, showing first how the corporate entities that comprised the traditional social order had lost cohesiveness after the Black Death. He traces the process of readjustment that began during the guild regime of 1378-1382, and analyzes the impact of foreign affairs. During the crisis years of the Visconti wars the distinctive features emerged of an elitist regime whose vitality was demonstrated following the death of Giangaleazzo Visconti and whose membership and style the author discusses in detail. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Following the developments that highlight the centrality of diasporas and transnational studies, this book proposes that the study of exile should become a topic of central concern, closely related to basic theoretical problems and controversies on the structure of power, national representation and transnational displacement.

From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.

In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

In Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Peter W. Sposato traces chivalry's powerful influence on the mentalitè and behavior of a sizeable segment of the elite in late medieval Florence. He finds that the strenuous knights and men-at-arms of the Florentine chivalric elite—a cultural community comprised of men from both traditional and newly emerged elite lineages—embraced a chivalric ideology that was fundamentally martial and violent. Chivalry helped to shape a common identity among these men based on the profession of arms and the ready use of violence against both their peers and those they perceived to be their social inferiors. This violence, often transgressive in nature, was not only crucial to asserting and defending personal, familial, and corporate honor, but was also inherently praiseworthy. In this way, Sposato highlights the sharp differences between chivalry and the more familiar civic ideology of the popolo grasso, the Florentine mercantile and banking elite who came to dominate Florence politically and economically during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As a result, in Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Sposato challenges the traditional scholarly view of chivalry as foreign to the social and cultural landscape of Florence and contests its reputation as a civilizing force. By reexamining the connection between chivalric literature and actual practice and identity formation among historical knights and men-at-arms, he likewise provides an important corrective to assumptions about the nature of elite violence and identity in medieval Italian cities.

Students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to go beyond the standard names and subjects will find in this text abundant information on the lives, customs, beliefs, and practices of those who lived during this exciting time period. The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia engages all of the Italian peninsula from the Black Death (1347–1352) to 1600. Unlike other encyclopedic works about the Renaissance era, this book deals exclusively with Italy, revealing the ways common Italian people lived and experienced the events and technological developments that marked the Renaissance era. The coverage specifically spotlights marginal or traditionally marginalized groups, including women, homosexuals, Jews, the elderly, and foreign communities in Italian cities. The entries in this two-volume set are organized into 10 sections of 25 alphabetically listed entries each. Among the broad sections are art, fashion, family and gender, food and drink, housing and community, politics, recreation and social customs, and war. The "See Also" sources for each article are listed by section for easy reference, a feature that students and researchers will greatly appreciate. The extensive collection of contemporary documents include selections from a diary, letters, a travel journal, a merchant's inventory, Inquisition testimony, a metallurgical handbook, and text by an artist that describes what the author feels constitutes great work. Each of the primary source documents accompanies a specific article and provides an added dimension and degree of insight to the material.