This book offers a new view of Italian Renaissance intellectual life, linking philosophy and literature as expressed in both Latin and Italian.

Originally published in 1982, this book tackles the underlying problem of what is meant by 'the Renaissance' and outlines those social, economic and topographical factors which triggered it off. It covers a number of subjects, the family, war, trade, religion and art but recognizing that the Renaissance was essentially an urban growth it focusses on 7 great Italian cities: Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Urbino, Mantua and Ferrara. It also includes studies of some extraordinary Renaissance individuals: Federigo Montefeltro, Isabella d'Este, Machiavelli, Baldasssare Castiglione, and the Medici clan, among others.

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.

Building the Italian Renaissance focuses on the competition to select a team to execute the final architectural challenge of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore--the erection of its dome. Although the model for the dome was widely known, the question of how this was to be accomplished was the great challenge of the age. This dome would be the largest ever built. This is foremost a technical challenge but it is also a philosophical one. The project takes place at an important time for Florence. The city is transitioning from a High Medieval world view into the new dynamics and ideas and will lead to the full flowering of what we know as the Renaissance. Thus the competition at the heart of this game plays out against the background of new ideas about citizenship, aesthetics, history (and its application to the present), and new technology. The central challenge is to expose players to complex and multifaceted situations and to individuals that animated life in Florence in the early 1400s. Humanism as a guiding philosophy is taking root and scholars are looking for ways to link the mercantile city to the glories of Rome and to the wisdom of the ancients across many fields. The aesthetics of the classical world (buildings, plastic arts and intellectual pursuits) inspired wonder, perhaps even envy, but the new approaches to the past by scholars such as Petrarch suggested that perhaps the creative classes are not simply crafts people, but men of ideas. Three teams compete for the honor to construct the dome, a project overseen by the Arte Della Lana (wool workers guild) and judged by them and a group of Florentine citizens who are merchants, aristocrats, learned men, and laborers. Their goal is to make the case for the building to live up to the ideals of Florence. The game gives students a chance to enter into the world of Florence in the early 1400s to develop an understanding of the challenges and complexity of such a major artistic and technical undertaking while providing an opportunity to grasp the interdisciplinary nature of major public works.

Originally published in 1982, this book tackles the underlying problem of what is meant by ‘the Renaissance’ and outlines those social, economic and topographical factors which triggered it off. It covers a number of subjects, the family, war, trade, religion and art but recognizing that the Renaissance was essentially an urban growth it focusses on 7 great Italian cities: Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Urbino, Mantua and Ferrara. It also includes studies of some extraordinary Renaissance individuals: Federigo Montefeltro, Isabella d’Este, Machiavelli, Baldasssare Castiglione, and the Medici clan, among others.

In some 750 alphabetical entries the internationally eminent Renaissance scholar John Hale and his team of thirty distinguished co-authors cover every aspect of history and culture. There is a wealth of entries dealing with general themes, from history to humor, patronage to prostitution, technology to town planning, as well as the important names in music, art, science, literature, scholarship, politics and religion, towns and states, wars and treaties. A subject-listing of all the entries -- biographies as well as general themes -- combines with intelligent, clear cross-referencing, and essential further reading is listed within entries. Relevant illustration, clear maps, family trees, tables of succession graphically displayed in a single time chart, and a glossary of Italian terms complete the supporting apparatus of this brilliant reference work. -- From publisher's description.

This work offers the first English-language survey of the book industry in Renaissance Italy. Whereas traditional accounts of the book in the Renaissance celebrate authors and literary achievement, this study examines the nuts and bolts of a rapidly expanding trade that built on existing economic practices while developing new mechanisms in response to political and religious realities. Approaching the book trade from the perspective of its publishers and booksellers, this archive-based account ranges across family ambitions and warehouse fires to publishers' petitions and convivial bookshop conversation. In the process it constructs a nuanced picture of trading networks, production, and the distribution and sale of printed books, a profitable but capricious commodity. Originally published in Italian as Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998; second, revised ed., 2003), this present English translation has not only been updated but has also been deeply revised and augmented.