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Florence (Renaissance and Reformation)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Florence has long been considered the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance because of the early and conspicuous development there of humanism and the city’s stunning innovations in the visual arts. Yet this landlocked city was also a major European economic center renowned for its thriving textile industries, extensive banking networks, and creative mechanisms of public finance. In contrast to the celebrated political stability of the Venetian republic, Florence was haunted by frequent political upheavals and deep social tensions that ultimately led to the collapse of the guild republic and the advent of the Medici principate in the early 16th century. Home to illustrious political figures such as Lorenzo de’ Medici, as well as thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Florence was at base a city of merchants and artisans throughout the republican period. It was their exceptional propensity for record keeping, as much as the city’s vaunted cultural achievements, that give Renaissance Florence its enduring reputation. Florentines began chronicling their own history in the 14th century, giving rise to a long and complex historiographical tradition. This article focuses on the major areas of scholarly inquiry that have emerged since the 1950s.
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  5. General Overviews
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  7. Single-Authored Works and multiauthored Collections of Essays provide complementary points of entry into Florentine studies: the first offer general syntheses, whereas the second tend to focus on specific themes.
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  9. Single-Authored Works
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  11. Davidsohn 1956–1968 remains the fundamental reference work for the early years of Florentine communal history. Najemy 2006 offers an updated narrative that nevertheless reaches back to the medieval origins of the commune c. 1200 but takes the story into the early granducal period. Brucker 1969 focuses on the late 14th and 15th centuries—the classic locus of the Florentine Renaissance—while Cochrane 1973 investigates the “forgotten” centuries that followed. Hale 1977 highlights the tangled relationship between the city and its first family, the Medici, in the 15th century.
  12.  
  13. Brucker, Gene A. Renaissance Florence. New York: Wiley, 1969.
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  15. Beautifully balanced, insightful introduction to the city’s social organization, major economic activities, principal political and religious institutions, and cultural achievements from the late 14th century to c. 1530.
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  17. Cochrane, Eric W. Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
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  19. Informative, in-depth analysis of all the major features of granducal Florence, from diplomacy, state administration, and official histories commissioned by the Medici to trends in philosophy and religion. Organized around six historical figures who present points of entry into different generational concerns and experiences.
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  21. Davidsohn, Robert. Storia di Firenze. 8 vols. Translated by Giovanni Battista Klein and Roberto Palmarocchi. Florence: Sansoni, 1956–1968.
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  23. One of the first modern analytic histories, it remains the fundamental starting point for medieval and early Renaissance Florentine history. Treats all aspects of political, social, economic, and religious life in the communal period. Original German edition published as Geschichte von Florenz (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1896–1927).
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  25. Hale, J. R. Florence the Medici: The Pattern of Control. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977.
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  27. Lucid, elegant introduction to the complex relationship between Florence and its first family in the 15th century, focusing on political dimensions.
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  29. Najemy, John M. A History of Florence, 1200–1575. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
  30. DOI: 10.1002/9780470754870Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  31. Detailed, knowledgeable overview of Florentine history that privileges a political narrative. Illuminates important continuities between medieval and Renaissance Florence, showing how the city was transformed from a medieval commune into an aristocratic republic and finally emerged as a princely state.
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  33. Collections of Essays
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  35. The extensive use of archival sources apparent in Rubinstein 1968 reflects the new standard for postwar Florentine studies—a standard that is fully sustained by the works listed here, which are focused on broad themes rather than being encyclopedic in nature. Tetel, et al. 1989 investigates the impact of the plague on 15th-century society and culture; Connell 2002 challenges Burckhardtian paradigms of Renaissance individualism; Crum and Paoletti 2006 takes up the social uses of urban space. The essays contained in Garfagnini 1983 and Eisenbichler 2001 reflect the growing interest in granducal Florence, especially in the context of European court culture and political centralization.
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  37. Connell, William J., ed. Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
  38. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520232549.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  39. Sixteen essays by leading scholars challenging the Burckhardtian view that Renaissance Florence was the birthplace of modern individualism, showing instead that Florentines remained deeply enmeshed in relationships of family, neighborhood, guild, patronage, and religion that conditioned individual identity and action.
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  41. Crum, Roger J., and John T. Paoletti, eds. Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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  43. Imaginative interdisciplinary collection of nineteen essays that chart neighborhood relations and the political, social, and gendered uses of urban space. Illuminates the ways in which civic and ecclesiastical monuments created the Renaissance cityscape and enhanced patrician self-definition from the 14th through the 16th centuries.
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  45. Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001.
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  47. Fifteen essays by Italian and anglophone scholars focusing on Duke Cosimo I’s diplomacy, artistic patronage, and court culture. Advances our understanding of how cultural productions and visual representations commissioned by or for the duke operated as instruments of statecraft.
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  49. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo, ed. Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici dell’Europa del ’500. 3 vols. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1983.
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  51. Wide-ranging collection treating the political and economic relations underlying cultural production in Medicean Tuscany (Vol. 1), relations between music and spectacle, and natural and political “sciences” (Vol. 2), and the influence of Tuscan artistic and architectural vocabulary on 16th-century Europe (Vol. 3).
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  53. Rubinstein, Nicolai, ed. Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence. London: Faber, 1968.
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  55. Fifteen influential essays by luminaries in the fields of political thought, political and social relations, and aspects of economic history ranging from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Still useful for the factual information presented, although some interpretations have been superseded by more-recent studies.
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  57. Tetel, Marcel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, eds. Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989.
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  59. Interdisciplinary collection of ten essays by major scholars exploring how recurrent episodes of plague transformed Florentine mentalities, humanism, civic culture, music, poetry, and religiosity.
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  61. Primary Sources
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  63. Florentines were renowned record keepers from the 13th century onward, generating abundant descriptive sources such as chronicles, diaries, and letters, as well as numerous documents of practice such as tax reports, wills, political deliberations, and legislation too numerous to list. The emphasis here falls on newly digitized materials that make it possible to consult otherwise-unpublished archival documents such as the famed Catasto of 1427 and the lists of officeholders contained in the Tratte registers. Rounding out these electronic resources are the Gazetteer of Sixteenth-Century Florence and the ambitious Medici Archive Project. The anthology of documents excerpted in Brucker 1971 provides a valuable introduction to the distinctive features of Florentine society, while the prolific correspondence written by Lorenzo de’ Medici (Medici 1977–) gives an intimate, personalized look at how power was exercised by one of the greatest Renaissance statesmen. Machiavelli 1988 provides a shrewd, firsthand assessment of the causes of the remarkable divisiveness that plagued the city’s history. Finally, the voluminous legislation collected in Cantini 1800–1808 is an indispensable resource for studying granducal Florence.
  64.  
  65. Brucker, Gene, ed. The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
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  67. Valuable anthology drawn from manuscript sources that illuminates almost every dimension of Florentine society, from marriage, family, and sexuality to death, violence, and public mores.
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  69. Cantini, Lorenzo, ed. Legislazione Toscana. 32 vols. Florence: Albizziniana, 1800–1808.
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  71. Fundamental collection of legislation enacted by the Medici dukes between 1532 and 1775 concerning all aspects of political, social, and economic life, arranged chronologically.
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  73. Catasto of 1427.
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  75. Searchable database of tax information for the city of Florence in 1427–1429, consisting of about ten thousand records, along with ancillary information. Fundamental resource for the study of early Renaissance Florence. Available in English and Italian.
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  77. Gazetteer of Sixteenth-Century Florence.
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  79. Database of about 750 items—churches, palaces, convents, monuments, and so forth—that can be located on the famed Buonsignori maps of ducal Florence published in 1584 and 1594.
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  81. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Florentine Histories. Translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
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  83. Traces the history of the city from its origins in Roman times to the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492, focusing on the causes of the profound factional divisions that afflicted Florence.
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  85. Medici, Lorenzo de’. Lettere. Edited by Nicolai Rubinstein and Riccardo Fubini. 12 vols. Florence: Giunti, 1977–.
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  87. Ambitious project to collect, edit, and publish the massive correspondence written in Italian and Latin by Lorenzo “the Magnificent” to statesmen and diplomats in Italy and Europe from 1460 until his death in 1492.
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  89. Medici Archive Project.
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  91. Innovative, ambitious project to transcribe and digitize over three million private letters and documents in the Medici Granducal Archive (1537–1743) and to make them accessible via fully searchable database. Still in the process of development.
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  93. Tratte.
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  95. Database consisting of about 165,000 records giving basic information about office holders of the Florentine republic during its 250-year history, from 1282 to 1532.
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  97. Guides to Collections
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  99. Florence boasts a wealth of libraries and archives whose vast manuscript holdings have made the city one of the world’s principal historical laboratories for Renaissance studies. The websites cited here offer useful overviews of the city’s major manuscript and print collections held by the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, and Opera del Duomo, which also provides guides to research, some digitized materials, and several online catalogues.
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  101. Archivio di Stato di Firenze.
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  103. Organizational overview of 600 fondi (series of registers) dating from the 8th century to the present, comprising 70 kilometers of documentary material. Portal into several important digitized collections such as Medici correspondence during the republican period (Mediceo Avanti il Principato) and parchments dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries (Diplomatico).
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  105. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
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  107. Overview of the library’s history, physical complex, services, and extensive holdings. Gives complete descriptions of available print catalogues for manuscript collections, incunabula, periodicals, and print collections, although most are not accessible online.
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  109. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
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  111. Offers several resources, including an online catalogue, guides to printed inventories both for manuscript and print collections, sample digitized materials (miscellaneous drawings by the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, numerous registers relating to Galileo and his scientific circle), although the majority of digital materials are available only on-site.
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  113. Biblioteca Riccardiana.
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  115. Lists published catalogues of manuscript holdings; sample digital images of some of the library’s precious manuscripts, including illuminations; small digital collection of extremely rare and precious manuscripts available for “virtual” consultation only; and links to various other databases and catalogues.
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  117. Opera del Duomo.
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  119. Portal to four major electronic resources relating to the Florentine cathedral: illuminated choral books, baptismal registers (mainly modern), digital archive of sources concerned with cathedral construction from 1417 to 1436, and photo archive.
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  121. Demography
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  123. The unparalleled richness of Florentine tax surveys and census records from the early 15th century onward enables scholars to reconstruct the city’s demographic features in considerable detail. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1978, an exhaustive study of the 1427 Catasto, set the gold standard for demographic analysis of premodern European societies. Battara 1935 pioneered the study of Florentine demography under the Medici dukes, using the 1552 ducal census; Meloni Trkjula 1991 offers a more intimate view of Florentine life on the basis of the 1562 ducal census. Litchfield 1969 tracks the long-term demographic fortunes of the Florentine elite over three centuries, showing the social strategies a select group of families used to retain their high social position.
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  125. Battara, Pietro. La popolazione di Firenze alla metà del ’500. Florence: Rinascimento del Libro, 1935.
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  127. Classic demographic analysis of the urban population on the basis of the 1552 census taken by Duke Cosimo I, assessing topographical distribution, sex ratio, relative proportion of lay and ecclesiastical inhabitants, and other signature features.
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  129. Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Les Toscans et leurs familles: Une etude du catasto florentin de 1427. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1978.
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  131. Exhaustive analysis of the data contained in the massive 1427 tax survey encompassing the city of Florence and the surrounding countryside. Analyzes essential demographic features such as sex ratio, age distribution, marital patterns, mortality rates, distribution of wealth, and household composition. Abridged English version published as Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
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  133. Litchfield, R. Burr. “Demographic Characteristics of Florentine Patrician Families, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of Economic History 29.2 (1969): 191–205.
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  135. Establishes that a select group of elite families retained both their longevity and elevated social position for over three centuries, primarily by means of well-calibrated marriage strategies and the forced placement of daughters in convents.
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  137. Meloni Trkulja, Silvia. I fiorentini nel 1562: Descritione delle bocche della città et stato di Fiorenza fatta l’anno 1562. Florence: A. Bruschi, 1991.
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  139. Part primary text, part secondary analysis of the 1562 ducal census, giving a more personal glimpse into the city’s residential patterns.
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  141. Medicine and Public Health
  142.  
  143. Renaissance Florence was celebrated for its extensive hospital system, which furnished the model for other Italian cities such as Milan as well as northern European countries such as England. Henderson 2006 provides a comprehensive look at this impressive network of caregiving institutions, with a particular focus on the main civic hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Sandri 1989 and Park 1991 succinctly situate Florentine hospitals as responses to the pressing social needs of urban poverty as well as illness. Ciasca 1927 is the foundational study of the organization of the Florentine guild of physicians and apothecaries, which Park 1985 brings up to date, especially regarding issues of professionalization. Examining the Florentine apothecary trade c. 1500, Shaw and Welch 2011 emphasizes the extent to which consumption and retailing shaped medical practice and health care. Carmichael 1989 surveys the major health problems afflicting Renaissance Florentines, while Carmichael 1986 focuses on Florentine responses to plague, primarily in the 15th century, and Calvi 1989 provides an original analysis of cultural responses to the 1630 plague. Mellyn 2014 offers the first systematic analysis of how Florentines developed pragmatic solutions to issues raised by mental disorders.
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  145. Calvi, Giulia. Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence. Translated by Dario Biocca and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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  147. Imaginative analysis of the public health measures, including quarantine, put in place to lessen the impact of the virulent 1630 plague, showing how these measures also reveal contemporaneous social and political anxieties. Original Italian version: Storie di un anno di peste (Milan: Bompiani, 1984).
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  149. Carmichael, Ann G. Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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  151. Establishes the growing association between poverty and plague over the course of the late 14th and 15th centuries, as urban elites developed effective strategies to escape the diseased city.
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  153. Carmichael, Ann G. “The Health Status of Florentines in the Fifteenth Century.” In Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Edited by Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, 28–45. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989.
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  155. Brief but knowledgeable survey of the major ailments, chronic and acute, afflicting 15th-century Florentines, giving rare insight into the health conditions shaping everyday life.
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  157. Ciasca, Raffaele. L’arte dei medici e speziali nella storia e nel commercio fiorentino dal secolo XII al XV. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1927.
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  159. Foundational study of the guild of physicians and apothecaries, including some primary-source materials. Traces how guild reorganization fostered the growing prestige and professional reputation of physicians and set new licensing standards for apothecaries. Reprinted in 1977.
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  161. Henderson, John. The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
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  163. Comprehensive examination of the city’s hospital network, focusing in particular on the main civic hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Illuminates aspects of contemporaneous medical care, hospital organization, spiritual objectives, and institutional architecture.
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  165. Mellyn, Elizabeth W. Mad Tuscans and Their Families: A History of Mental Disorder in Early Modern Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
  166. DOI: 10.9783/9780812209815Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  167. Using three hundred civil and criminal cases heard in Florentine courts from the mid-14th to the mid-17th centuries, reconstructs the ways in which families, communities, and civic officials tried to develop pragmatic solutions to mental disorders.
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  169. Park, Katherine. Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
  170. DOI: 10.1515/9781400855001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  171. Exploring corporate aspects of medical professionalization, shows how physicians came to dominate their composite guild and achieve preeminence over other kinds of healers in the 15th century. Illuminates issues of medical training and career paths, the medical marketplace, doctors’ social standing, and physicians’ cultural roles.
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  173. Park, Katherine. “Healing the Poor: Hospitals and Medical Assistance in Renaissance Florence.” In Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State. Edited by Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones, 26–45. London: Routledge, 1991.
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  175. Short, probing study of the extensive Florentine hospital network; directed at issues of social welfare as well as individual medical treatment. Shows the integral connection between the practice of medicine and charitable initiatives in Renaissance Florence.
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  177. Sandri, Lucia. “Ospedali e utenti dell’assistenza nella Firenze del Quattrocento.” In La società del bisogno: Povertà e assistenza nella Toscana medievale. Edited by Giuliano Pinto, 61–100. Florence: Salimbeni, 1989.
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  179. Succinct analysis of the complex interrelationships among poverty, disease, and institutional care, on the basis of archival sources. Illuminates the role of hospitals as charitable institutions that cared for the urban poor.
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  181. Shaw, James, and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence. Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011.
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  183. Knowledgeable examination of how medicinals were made, supplied, and sold in late-15th-century Florence, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of the business registers kept by the apothecary shop known as Speziale al Giglio.
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  185. Politics and the Florentine State
  186.  
  187. The Florentine state is one of the best-studied polities in premodern Europe. Studies of Florentine politics in the republican period (1282–1532) dominated anglophone historiography from the 1950s through the 1970s, with only scant attention paid to the equally long-lived Medici principate. In the early 21st century, scholars have integrated social and economic perspectives into the republican political narrative, especially when analyzing Medici political power after 1434, and have called attention to long-term continuities linking republican and princely forms of governance.
  188.  
  189. The Florentine Republic, 1282–1532
  190.  
  191. From its foundation in 1282 to its collapse in 1532, the Florentine republic was beset by internal strife as well as external threats, especially before the emergence of consensus politics under the Medici. Brucker 1962 and Brucker 1977 meticulously reconstruct the political debates, the process of decision making, and the factional conflicts that animated Florentine politics from 1343 to 1430—one of the most tumultuous periods in Florentine history—a formative era also investigated in Becker 1967–1968. Kent 1978 shows how the Medici initially gained political ascendance through clientage, while Rubinstein 1966 establishes that the family maintained its power by manipulating legitimate electoral processes. Kent 2004 explores how Lorenzo the Magnificent blurred the lines between political and artistic patronage. Both Bullard 1980 and Stephens 1983 are concerned with the waning years of the republic, fraught with political missteps and misalliances. Baker 2013 posits deep continuities between republican traditions and the political discourse of the Medici principate, which made this watershed transition in governance possible.
  192.  
  193. Baker, Nicholas Scott. The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  194. DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674726390Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  195. Provocative revisionist interpretation of the transition from republic to principate. Rather than positing a sharp contrast between political regimes, instead emphasizes important continuities in language, images, and social identities of office holders from the late 15th to the mid-16th centuries.
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  197. Becker, Marvin B. Florence in Transition. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967–1968.
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  199. Bold, original perspective on the formation of the Florentine Renaissance state, linking such diverse subjects as the development of public credit, civic humanism, and lay religiosity. Vol. 1 traces the decline of the 14th-century commune; Vol. 2 considers the rise of the territorial state.
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  201. Brucker, Gene. Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962.
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  203. Lucid reconstruction of one of the most turbulent times in the republic’s history, riddled by political coups and factionalism, class strains, war with the papacy, and a major uprising of wool workers against oligarchic control.
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  205. Brucker, Gene. The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
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  207. The standard political history of Florence from 1378 to 1430, a period that saw a gradual shift from corporate styles and mentalities to a more elitist polity, as well as the emergence of a strong civic ethos among statesmen.
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  209. Bullard, Melissa Meriam. Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favor and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  210. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511896651Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. Reassesses the career of the aristocratic Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi (b. 1489–d. 1538), best known as an outspoken defender of the last Florentine republic against the new Medici dukes. Documents the intricate ties between Florence and the papal court and Strozzi’s manipulation of public funds to pay for papal wars.
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  213. Kent, Dale. The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
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  215. Meticulous study showing how Cosimo de’ Medici created extensive networks of allies and friends that helped secure his return from exile in 1434, leading to the family’s rise as ad hoc rulers of Florence.
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  217. Kent, Francis William. Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
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  219. Elegant, insightful portrait of Lorenzo “il Magnifico” and his relationship to the arts, especially in the context of his role as the political boss of republican Florence and a leading figure in Renaissance diplomacy.
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  221. Rubinstein, Nicolai. The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434–1494). Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.
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  223. Definitive study of how the Medici established and exercised political power by controlling electoral processes for major civic offices.
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  225. Stephens, John. The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512–1530. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
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  227. Exposes the competing ideologies, external alliances, and political infighting that marked the waning years of the republic, leading to its downfall after a protracted siege by imperial troops in 1529–1530.
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  229. The Medici Duchy
  230.  
  231. Anglophone scholars have devoted less attention to the workings of the Medici duchy than to republican politics, largely because of the view that the Florentine republic was an important antecedent of American democracy. Unfettered by these ideological constraints, Italian historians such as Elena Fasano Guarini (Fasano Guarini 1973) and Furio Diaz (Diaz 1976) were among the first to analyze the legal and administrative scaffolding of the late Renaissance ducal state. Subsequent standout contributions in Litchfield 1986 and Litchfield 2008 have illuminated changing class relations and patrician accommodations to the new regime, while Siegmund 2006 views the construction of the ducal state through the lens of the forced ghettoization of local Jews. Dall’Aglio 2011 moves beyond stale polemics that treat the ducal assassin Lorenzino de’ Medici either as a republican hero or vulgar criminal.
  232.  
  233. Dall’Aglio, Stefano. L’assassino del duca: Esilio e morte di Lorenzino de’ Medici. Biblioteca Storica Toscana 64. Florence: Olschki, 2011.
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  235. On the basis of new archival documentation, reexamines the historical circumstances surrounding the assassination of the first Medici duke Alessandro by his kinsman Lorenzino in January 1537 and follows Lorenzino’s political activities until his death in 1548.
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  237. Diaz, Furio. Il granducato di Toscana. Turin, Italy: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1976.
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  239. Analyzes the construction, operation, and formal political apparatus of the Medici ducal state, from the abolition of republican magistracies in 1532 to the creation of more-centralizing ducal offices.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Fasano Guarini, Elena. Lo stato mediceo di Cosimo I. Florence: Sansoni, 1973.
  242. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  243. Sophisticated examination of the ducal state under Cosimo I, especially its sprawling, often-contradictory legal apparatus and numerous layers of accommodation, by one of the leading Italian historians of state formation. Argues that ducal policies represented an adaptation and continuation of republican forms.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Litchfield, R. Burr. Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Establishes the remarkable longevity of Florentine patricians as a social group, their deep investment in the evolving ducal state as functionaries, and the remaking of the Tuscan bureaucracy by the Hapsburg-Lorraine dukes in the 18th century.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Litchfield, R. Burr. Florence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630. New York: ACLS Humanities, 2008.
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  251. Panoramic study of Florence during the first century of Medici ducal rule, showcasing the city’s physical changes, ducal initiatives and the court, growth of ecclesiastical institutions, patrician responses to ducal governance, and the economic status and residential patterns of artisans and workers, concluding with an examination of the 1630 plague. Available online.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Siegmund, Stefanie. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. On the basis of extensive archival research, argues convincingly that the 1570 forced ghettoization of Florentine Jews formed part of a larger process of Medici centralization—an initiative that created a formal Jewish community that previously had not existed.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. The Territorial State
  258.  
  259. The Florentine dominion expanded rapidly in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, with a second surge coming in the mid-16th century under the Medici dukes. Questions driving the study of the territorial state include the rationales Florentine statesmen and humanists offered for territorial expansion, the mechanisms by which subject territories were integrated into mainstream political structures, the extent to which they were exploited economically, and local accommodation and resistance to Florentine hegemony. Cohn 1999 argues that peasants, especially those living in mountainous areas, stimulated the creation of the Florentine state by rebelling against its onerous tax policies, thus forcing humanists to justify their actions. Connell and Zorzi 2000 offers a multifaceted look at the mechanisms by which Florence integrated its subject territories, as well as the political vocabulary Florentine statesmen developed to legitimate local dominance. Brown 1982, Benadusi 1996, and Connell 2000 all examine issues of accommodation and resistance through case studies of clientage in nearby towns.
  260.  
  261. Benadusi, Giovanna. A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
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  263. Studies interactions between the strategies of provincial families in the small Tuscan town of Poppi and the politics of the Florentine ducal government. Argues that men from Poppi retained local control through a series of trade-offs with central authority, illuminating the ways power and resistance operated at the everyday level.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Brown, Judith C. In the Shadow of Florence: Provincial Society in Renaissance Pescia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
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  267. Perceptive assessment of the long-term economic, social, and political relationships between Florence and the small town of Pescia in northwest Tuscany, arguing that hard times following the Black Death were attributable to natural population shifts within the Tuscan regional economy and to the expectation that subjects should help subsidize warfare.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  270. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511496448Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. Provocative study of resistance to onerous Florentine tax policies imposed on local peasant communities, the ways that resistance varied by topography, and the rationales that statesmen and humanists were forced to articulate in order to justify Florentine expansion and dominance.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Connell, William J. La città dei crucci: Fazioni e clientele in uno stato repubblicano del ’400. Florence: Nuova Toscana, 2000.
  274. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  275. Examines Florentine hegemony through a case study of clientage and faction in 15th-century Pistoia, one of the earliest satellites in the Florentine territorial state.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Connell, William J., and Andrea Zorzi, eds. Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  278. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523120Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. Important collection of seventeen essays by major scholars, examining the formation of the Florentine state in the late 14th and 15th centuries, its political vocabulary, and justifications for expansion given by civic humanists, as well as economic and patronage relationships between Florence and its dominion.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Law and Criminal Justice
  282.  
  283. The Florentine criminal justice system consisted of an amalgam of overlapping, often-redundant jurisdictions. Stern 1994 provides a good step-by-step introduction to the process involved in criminal prosecutions in the 14th and 15th centuries, while Brackett 1992 takes the story forward in time into the granducal period. Zorzi 1988 and Zorzi 1994 argue that Florentine criminal justice was characterized by pragmatic flexibility in its administration; Edgerton 1985 is concerned with the public judicial practice that used painted images to punish or defame an offender. Martines 1968 shows how lawyers influenced the exercise of political power by placing their skills at the service of the state.
  284.  
  285. Brackett, John K. Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  286. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287. Examines the Florentine criminal justice system under the first three Medici grand dukes. Discusses the structure and functions of the main criminal court, the two city prisons, and the major categories of crime. Argues that criminal justice relied on negotiation, thus challenging views that the ducal state was “absolutist.”
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
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  291. Intriguing art-historical study of the public judicial practice called pitture infamanti, which punished criminals and disgraced other malefactors by painting their image on the exterior of the Florentine hall of justice.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Martines, Lauro. Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.
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  295. Fundamental study of lawyers and notaries covering the period 1380 to 1530, on the basis of exhaustive archival research. Investigates their social backgrounds and shows how lawyers put their skills at the service of the Florentine oligarchy, thereby contributing to and influencing the exercise of political power.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Stern, Laura Ikens. The Criminal Law System of Medieval and Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
  298. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. Analysis of the three major criminal courts operative in 14th- and 15th-century Florence, derived mainly from legal statutes and a small sample of court cases. Provides a step-by-step explanation of trial procedure from standards of proof through sentencing.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Zorzi, Andrea. L’amministrazione della giustizia penale nella repubblica fiorentina: Aspetti e problemi. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1988.
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  303. Comprehensive study of the Florentine criminal justice system in the republican period, deeply rooted in archival materials. Argues that the communal government adopted a pragmatic flexibility in handling criminal cases, rather than taking a hard ideological position.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Zorzi, Andrea. “The Judicial System in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” In Crime, Society, and the Law in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, 40–58. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  306. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523410Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. Useful, updated summation of Zorzi 1988 for students and scholars who do not read Italian.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Society
  310.  
  311. Perennial competition for social place in the absence of a legally identified patriciate, coupled with potential advancement through commercial wealth and political service, made republican Florence an agonistic, turbulent society. Aristocratic dominance under the Medici dukes quelled social unrest, but competition for ducal preferment continued to animate Florentine society.
  312.  
  313. Nobles and the “Popolo”
  314.  
  315. Early communal Florence in the 13th and 14th centuries was ravaged by grievous conflicts for political power between urbanized feudal nobles known as magnates and a conglomerate of groups called the “popolo,” who earned their livelihood through commerce. Salvemini 1960 remains the standard work on the early phases of these contests that generated the foundation of the guild republic. Lansing 1991 integrates social perspectives into these political narratives, looking at issues of lineage identity among magnate families who operated under new legal restrictions from the 1290s onward. Rodolico 1971 investigates the important but short-lived uprising of the city’s wool workers in 1378, known as the Ciompi revolt, in which they attempted to gain a greater political voice. Finally, Cohn 1980 assesses the major social and cultural characteristics of the working classes, as well as their changing political aspirations in the 15th century.
  316.  
  317. Cohn, Samuel Kline, Jr. The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. Well-grounded analysis that illuminates networks of associations, marriage patterns, neighborhood distribution, and political activities among the Florentine laboring classes. Argues for aspects of class struggle between workers and patricians.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Lansing, Carol. The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
  322. DOI: 10.1515/9781400862344Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  323. Examines the organization of some seventy magnate lineages in the 13th century, illuminating their cohesion and mutual relations as well as the status of women within them. Argues that magnates were defined less by specific economic interests than by a distinctive culture.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Rodolico, Niccolò. I Ciompi. Florence: Sansoni, 1971.
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  327. Thorough analysis that brings a Marxist perspective to this uprising of wool workers, considered here as a proto-proletariat acting out of deep economic grievances and common interests.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Salvemini, Gaetano. Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1960.
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  331. Classic study that reconstructs the formative contest for power between powerful feudal magnates and a host of urban, commercial families, resulting in the founding of the guild republic in 1282.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Marriage, Family, and Household
  334.  
  335. Family was the single most significant force conditioning Florentine social life. Kent 1977 shows that households and lineages were not competing forms of family organization but interdependent ones. Molho 1994 demonstrates that the city’s principal families retained their prominence over several centuries via endogamy. Both Fabbri 1991 and Crabb 2000 look at the Strozzi family—the first, to assess contemporaneous notions of a marriage market; the second, to explore issues of family solidarity. Brucker 1986 adopts a microhistorical approach to illuminate contemporaneous marriage practices, while Ciappelli and Rubin 2000 explores how art and material objects produced familial memory. Finally, Kuehn 1991 and Kuehn 2008 reveal the plasticity of inheritance law and the creativity with which Florentines used it.
  336.  
  337. Brucker, Gene. Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
  338. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Fascinating microhistory of a disputed marriage between an upper-class man and an artisan woman in mid-15th-century Florence. Provides a succinct introduction to Florentine marriage practices and strategies.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Ciappelli, Giovanni, and Patricia Rubin, eds. Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  343. Valuable collection of essays that examine the relationship between the production of objects and the production of memory and history in 15th-century Florence, showing how art reinforced a sense of family pasts.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Crabb, Ann Morton. The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
  346. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Based on the rich correspondence between Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi and her three sons exiled by the Medici in the 1440s. Tells the story of the recovery of one important patrician family and illuminates the role of women, kinship solidarity, honor, and profit.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Fabbri, Lorenzo. Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400: Studio sulla famiglia Strozzi. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1991.
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  351. Using forty-two marriages in the Strozzi family between 1387 and 1510 as its principal source base, argues that marriages and the very idea of a “marriage market” in the Florentine upper classes were fundamentally shaped by the mental world of the merchant.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Kent, Francis William. Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
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  355. Now-classic study demonstrating that nuclear families living in separate households and their lineage-based clans shared organic relations of interdependence, rather than being opposing forms of social organization.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Kuehn, Thomas. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
  358. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226457659.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. Ten deeply researched essays that demonstrate how law, conceived as a social process rather than an inert body of statutes, exerted a formative influence on women and families. Reveals striking tensions within Florentine property law that could either favor or disadvantage women depending on circumstances.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Kuehn, Thomas. Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  362. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511511806Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. Combining legal anthropology with archival research, shows how Florentines repudiated family inheritances as a way to cope with contingencies while still advancing familial goals. Moves beyond paradigms of Renaissance individualism to expose the often-tense dynamics driving social and family life.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Molho, Anthony. Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
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  367. Impressive monograph that reconstructs the matrimonial and social strategies of the Florentine ruling class in the 15th century, on the basis of an exhaustive study of the vast records of the communal dowry fund. Shows how Florentines retained a strong class endogamy by carefully calculating their choice of marriage partners.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Sources
  370.  
  371. Alberti 1969 presents a view of family life in dialogue form, one that is animated both by humanist ideals and mercantile values.
  372.  
  373. Alberti, Leon Battista. The Family in Renaissance Florence. Translated by Renée Neu Watkins. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969.
  374. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. Dialogue between elderly patrician males and their nephews, written in Italian c. 1434, instructing them in the ethics of family life and the enduring value of money and reputation.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Women
  378.  
  379. Much of the historiography on Florentine and Italian Renaissance women concerns the nature and strength of their agency, and the extent to which their social and economic status either suffered or prospered during the Renaissance era. Klapisch-Zuber 1985 set much of the initial research agenda, arguing that Florentine women in every phase of life experienced serious social, legal, and financial deficits, a position reinforced in Cohn 1996 but nuanced in Chabot 1988 and Chabot 1990. Using unpublished letters, Gori 2012 reconstructs the biography of Contessina Bardi, who married the scion of the Medici family in 1415. Cohen 1992 capitalizes on records kept by custodial institutions for repentant prostitutes to illuminate both the ideological challenges and practical obstacles confronting women in the lower social tiers. By contrast, Tomas 2003 demonstrates the power and influence exercised by Medici women, who had access to significant social capital and political resources. Strunck 2011 takes the story of Medici court women further in time and assesses their importance as cultural brokers between Florence and other early modern European courts.
  380.  
  381. Chabot, Isabelle. “Widowhood and Poverty in Late Medieval Florence.” In Special Issue: Charity and the Poor in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Continuity and Change 3.S2 (1988): 291–311.
  382. DOI: 10.1017/S0268416000000989Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Shows that Florentine widows were vulnerable to impoverishment, defined as declining social status and declining standard of living, due to lack of legal control over their dotal resources.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Chabot, Isabelle. “La reconnaissance du travail des femmes dans la Florence du bas Moyen Âge: Contexte idéologique et réalité.” In La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–XVIII. Edited by Simonetta Cavaciocchi, 563–576. Florence: Le Monnier, 1990.
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  387. Argues that Florentine women’s participation in the workforce dropped after the Black Death, despite a scarcity of labor, because of fierce competition between women and men for the same positions.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Cohen, Sherrill. The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
  390. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Comprehensive study of three innovative Tuscan women’s asylums designed to rehabilitate repentant prostitutes and at-risk girls, from their origins in the 14th century to the late 20th century. Portrays some of the lives and fortunes of their inhabitants and illuminates the circumstances that forced women to enter asylums.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Cohn, Samuel Kline, Jr. Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
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  395. Seven essays on women, sex, violence, and piety, drawing on extensive archival documentation and arguing for a decline in women’s status from the late 14th century through the Counter-Reformation. Contends that Florence was the worst place to be a woman as far as control over property was concerned.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Gori, Orsola. Una donna del Rinascimento: Contessina Bardi. Biblioteca dell’Orso. Vernio, Italy: Accademia Bardi, 2012.
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  399. Rich, historically situated biography of Contessina Bardi, wife of Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, on the basis of previously unpublished archival documents. Includes transcriptions of thirty-seven letters written in Italian by Contessina, eight letters sent to her, and an additional thirteen letters related to her family life.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
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  403. Fourteen landmark essays drawing on merchant diaries and demographic records. Probes the social networks that mattered most to Renaissance Florentines, their marriage and naming practices, and concepts of childhood, concluding that Florentine women experienced serious legal and social deficits.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Strunck, Christina, ed. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators (1533–1743): Le donne di casa Medici e il loro ruolo di mediatrici culturali fra le corti d’Europa. Papers presented at the international conference “Artful Allies: Medici Women as Cultural Mediators,” held in October 2008 in Florence. Biblioteca d’Arte 35. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011.
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  407. Wide-ranging collection of fifteen essays in English and Italian that reveal the impressive extent to which Medici court women functioned as cultural brokers between Florence and other European courts.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Tomas, Natalie R. The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.
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  411. Subtle, well-researched study showing how Medici wives, widows, and mothers collaborated with their kinsmen, exercised political and social power in their own right as patrons, and negotiated gender constraints in the 15th and early 16th centuries.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Sources
  414.  
  415. Women’s letters provide a particularly intimate glimpse into everyday concerns. The oft-cited correspondence published in Strozzi 1877 has provided the basis of several studies. Tornabuoni 1993 throws the exceptional influence and agency of Medici women into sharp relief.
  416.  
  417. Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi. Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo XV ai figliuoli esuli. Edited by Cesare Guasti. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1877.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Seventy-two letters written in the mid-15th century by a loving, pragmatic mother to her exiled sons, filled with advice, pious reflections, and astute political observations. Partial bilingual edition available as Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi, translated by Heather Gregory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Tornabuoni, Lucrezia. Lettere. Edited by Patrizia Salvadori. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. Correspondence written by the politically influential, revered mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent to assorted recipients, revealing her engagement with and knowledge of architectural projects, political affairs, and personal health concerns, among other issues.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Gender and Sexuality
  426.  
  427. Renaissance Florence had a flourishing culture of illicit sexuality revolving around prostitution and male homosexuality. Trexler 1993 and Brackett 1993 focus on civic rationales for regulating and tolerating prostitution, while Mazzi 1991 looks at the often-violent social interactions between prostitutes and clients. Terpstra 2010 argues that the high mortality rates experienced in a shelter for homeless girls in the mid-16th century probably can be attributed to syphilis. Rocke 1996 is the definitive study of male same-sex relations. Ruggiero 2007 considers normative patterns of male sexuality, arguing that male sexual identity changed over the life cycle. Baker 2010 considers the deeply interwoven political and sexual reputations of the first two Medici dukes.
  428.  
  429. Baker, Nicholas Scott. “Power and Passion in Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Sexual and Political Reputations of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19.3 (2010): 432–457.
  430. DOI: 10.1353/sex.2010.0020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. Blending archival scholarship with theoretical sophistication, argues persuasively that the contrasting political reputations of these Medici dukes became intimately linked to their sexual reputations: the libidinous Alessandro was reviled, whereas the monogamous Cosimo was praised by contemporaries.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Brackett, John K. “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680.” Sixteenth Century Journal 24.2 (1993): 273–300.
  434. DOI: 10.2307/2541951Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. Examines the structure and operation of the Office of Decency from its inception in 1403 to its absorption by the city’s chief criminal court in 1680. Argues that the office became more interested in exploiting prostitutes and failed because of prostitutes’ resistance to the process of registration.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Mazzi, Maria Serena. Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del quattrocento. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Extensive descriptions and analysis of roughly thirty “exemplary” sex cases drawn from early-15th-century court records, illuminating the relationship between sex and violence and suggesting that courts tried to police sexual morality.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  442. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. Essential study of the widespread male same-sex relationships for which Florence was known, analyzing social characteristics of participants, as well as religious reactions and changing legal responses to homosexuality. Shows that same-sex relationships formed an integral part of male sociability and culture.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Ruggiero, Guido. Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. Combining imaginative readings of literary works with archival evidence, argues that Italians understood sexual identity as part of the life cycle, moving through stages of youthful experimentation, marriage, adult companionship, and old age.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Terpstra, Nicholas. Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Provocative analysis of the life stories and demographic patterns pertaining to some five hundred orphaned girls living in a charitable shelter (the Casa della Pietà) in the 1550s and 1560s. Argues that the high mortality rates there were likely due to syphilis acquired congenitally or through coercive sex.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Trexler, Richard C. “Florentine Prostitution in the Fifteenth Century: Patrons and Clients.” In Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence. Vol. 2, The Women of Renaissance Florence. Edited by Richard C. Trexler, 31–65. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993.
  454. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. Pioneering study, originally published in 1981, of the structure of Florentine prostitution: the founding of civic brothels, prostitutes’ working conditions, social identity of brothel keepers, civic regulation of prostitution, and social contradictions surrounding the sex trade.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Neighborhoods, Social Relations, and Ritual Life
  458.  
  459. Neighborhoods formed one of the mainstays of Florentine social life. Despite their social importance, neighborhoods are difficult to define with precision since their fluid topographical boundaries only partially overlapped with the city’s sixteen administrative wards and fifty-two parishes. Questions driving this subfield are the changing class composition of Florentine neighborhoods and the continued strength of local ties as the republic gave way to the principate. Litchfield 1991 argues that it was not until 1600 that artisans and workers were definitively pushed to the outskirts of the city. Kent and Kent 1982 demonstrates the continued vitality of neighborhood alliances, which served an informal political function into the mid-15th century. Eckstein 1995 takes an in-depth look at social dynamics in one working-class district in the Oltrarno; Burke 2006 argues that elites in this urban sector fashioned and asserted their familial identity by constructing tombs in their parish churches. Turning to the city’s ritual life and use of public spaces, Trexler 1980 offers a provocative argument that is partially countered in Ciappelli 1997. Mantini 1995 emphasizes deep continuities between republican and princely uses of the urban landscape, while Strocchia 1992 focuses more narrowly on the deployment of space in funerary rites. Rosenthal 2010 and Rosenthal 2013 probe the extent to which ritualized festive activities could help artisans establish a political presence and distinctive social identity in granducal Florence.
  460.  
  461. Burke, Jill. “Visualizing Neighborhood in Renaissance Florence: Santo Spirito and Santa Maria del Carmine.” Journal of Urban History 32.5 (2006): 693–710.
  462. DOI: 10.1177/0096144206287094Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Argues that elite merchant families in the Oltrarno sector made important statements about their family identity and local loyalties by constructing tombs in their parish churches.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Ciappelli, Giovanni. Carnevale e Quaresima: Comportamenti sociali e cultura a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1997.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Judicious analysis of the reciprocal relationship between Carnival and Lent, taking into account Florentine notions of the calendar, ascetic practices such as abstaining from food and sex, and other forms of ceremonial life. Counters Trexler 1980 that changes in Carnival practice in the late 15th century represented a “ritual revolution.”
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Eckstein, Nicholas. The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995.
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  471. Clear, well-focused study of a predominantly working-class ward, showing the strength of local neighborhood ties and confraternal associations, as well as struggles in the 1420s and 1430s with civic-Medicean networks that ultimately took over the neighborhood.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Kent, Dale V., and Francis W. Kent. Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1982.
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  475. Brings to life the vitality of local associations among neighbors and establishes the continued political importance of neighborhoods as nodes of sociability until the mid-15th century.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Litchfield, R. Burr. Dalla repubblica al granducato: Il nuovo aspetto socio-spaziale di Firenze, 1551–1632. Translated by Gigliola Fragnito and Franek Sznura. Florence: Università degli Studi di Firenze, 1991.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Analyzes relationships between social class and residential patterns, arguing that artisans and workers were pushed from the heart of the city into neighborhoods on the urban periphery c. 1600.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Mantini, Silvia. Lo spazio sacro della Firenze medicea: Trasformazioni urbane e cerimoniali pubblici tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento. Florence: Loggia de’ Lanzi, 1995.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Studies the transformations in the ritual use of public space between the 15th-century republic and the 16th-century Medici principate, highlighting many continuities in usage on which the grand dukes built.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Rosenthal, David. “‘Every Sort of Manual Type, and Mostly Foreigners’: Migrants, Brothers and Festive Kings in Early Modern Florence.” In Special Issue: Locating Communities in the Early Modern Italian City. Urban History 37.S3 (2010): 360–371.
  486. DOI: 10.1017/S0963926810000507Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Shows how an artisan festive organization, composed mainly of German textile workers, enhanced its political presence by constructing the biggest street corner tabernacle in the city in 1522.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Rosenthal, David. “Owning the Corner: The ‘Powers’ of Florence and the Question of Agency.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16.1–2 (2013): 181–196.
  490. DOI: 10.1086/673420Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. Uses the neighborhood conflict between two artisan festive groups in 1559 as a lens through which to view the limits of agency exercised by Florentine working-class men.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Strocchia, Sharon T. Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
  494. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. Examines the structure of funerals, mourning, and commemorative practices, tracing their changing meanings and representations from the Black Death to the end of the republic.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Trexler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980.
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  499. Original, provocative interpretation of Florentine collective ritual behavior in all its forms, focusing on symbolic interaction and the manipulation of symbols, objects, and spaces. Argues that there was a “ritual revolution” in the 1490s, in which young boys replaced their fathers as the city’s saviors.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Economy
  502.  
  503. The relative health of the Florentine economy is perhaps the most hotly contested area in early-21st-century scholarship. Was Renaissance Florence marked by hard times and economic decline or rather by prosperity and bold shifts in investments?
  504.  
  505. Civic Finance, Banking, and Money
  506.  
  507. Looking at the performance of all economic sectors, Goldthwaite 2009 contends that the Florentine economy retained its vitality from the 13th through the 16th centuries, rather than falling into serious troughs owing to plague or other exogenous forces. Molho 1971 and Conti 1984 study the vicissitudes of the Florentine public debt as an index to changing tax policies associated with state formation and Medici control, a project summarized and clarified in Molho 1995. De Roover 1963 remains the standard study of the Medici bank; Cipolla 1989 and Goldthwaite and Mandich 1994 provide essential technical studies of Florentine currencies. Carter and Goldthwaite 2013 breaks new ground by using the business life of a famed composer as a window onto larger economic structures and practices.
  508.  
  509. Carter, Tim, and Richard A. Goldthwaite. Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History 10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  510. DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674726574Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511. Exemplary interdisciplinary study by a musicologist and economic historian. Uses newly discovered account books kept by the musician-composer Jacopo Peri to shed light on his career and business practices, as well as the broader Florentine economy at the turn of the 17th century.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Cipolla, Carlo M. Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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  515. Short technical examination of the various currencies in circulation and their relative exchange values in an era marked by the influx of New World bullion. Original Italian edition published as La moneta a Firenze nel Cinquecento (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1987).
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Conti, Elio. L’imposta diretta a Firenze nel Quattrocento (1427–1494). Rome: Nella Sede dell’Istituto, 1984.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. Studies the relationships among direct tax assessments, the health of the public fisc, and political power in the 15th century. Shows that the Medici set aside the equitable tax distribution of the Catasto in favor of older forms of distributing tax burdens.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. De Roover, Raymond Adrien. The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.
  522. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  523. Classic study of Medici banking operations that uses the history of the firm to summarize contemporaneous business practice and to survey the world of international commerce and banking. Supplements business records with the family’s extensive correspondence to gain insight into management problems and the business acumen of various Medici.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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  527. Tour de force by a leading economic historian, who maintains that the Renaissance Florentine economy performed relatively well owing to the robust contribution of the artisan sector. Synthesizes massive secondary work on all economic sectors from the commercial revolution before 1300 to the late 16th century, integrating new archival findings.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Goldthwaite, Richard A., and Giulio Mandich. Studi sulla moneta fiorentina (secoli XIII–XVI). Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994.
  530. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  531. Comprehensive examination of issues associated with a complex bimetallic currency system and monies of account, including assessment of exchange rates.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Molho, Anthony. Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 1400–1433. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
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  535. Shows how the public fisc experienced a series of crises in the early 15th century that seriously weakened it and increased tax burdens on inhabitants, yet paradoxically stimulated foreign investments and innovations in finance such as the 1427 Catasto.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Molho, Anthony. “The State and Public Finance: A Hypothesis Based on the History of Late Medieval Florence.” In The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600. Edited by Julius Kirshner, 97–135. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. Considers the complex nexus of warfare, territorial expansion, and the distribution of tax burdens on the administration of the Florentine state, flagging the problems in generalizing about state formation from the Florentine case.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Guilds and Manufacturing
  542.  
  543. Textile manufacturing was the lifeblood of the Florentine economy from the 13th century onward. Hoshino 1980 shows that the wool industry, which employed thousands of workers in differentiated production processes, remained a vital economic sector throughout the 15th century. Franceschi 1993 investigates the living conditions and group solidarity of Florentine wool workers after the Ciompi uprising in 1378. Brown 1986 studies changing patterns of women’s involvement in textile production. To this industrial backbone was added the thriving new industry of silk production, which catered to an international luxury market. De Roover 1999 and Dini 1995 examine the structure of the silk industry, whose bold entrepreneurs reaped enormous profits while its work force, including young children, earned only meager wages, according to Franceschi 1996. Frick 2002 considers the textile industry from the standpoint of fashion and fine clothing. Finally, Goldthwaite 1980 provides a comprehensive picture of the construction industry, illuminating the 15th-century building boom that transformed the Florentine cityscape.
  544.  
  545. Brown, Judith C. “A Woman’s Place Was in the Home: Women’s Work in Renaissance Tuscany.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 206–224. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. Argues that women were squeezed out of wool production by German men in the late 14th century but reappeared in significant numbers in the late 16th century, largely due to silk manufacture. Illuminates barriers to women’s work.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. De Roover, Florence Edler. L’arte della seta a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV. Edited by Sergio Tognetti. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999.
  550. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Insightful, comprehensive study of the Florentine silk industry in its early phases, from the business activities of silk entrepreneurs to production processes.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Dini, Bruno. Saggi su una economia-mondo: Firenze e l’Italia fra Mediterraneo ed Europa (secc. XIII–XVI). Pisa, Italy: Pacini, 1995.
  554. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  555. Essays analyzing discrete economic problems such as Florentine silk manufacture, set in the context of international commerce and business exchanges.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Franceschi, Franco. Oltre il “Tumulto”: I lavoratori fiorentini dell’Arte della Lana fra Tre e Quattrocento. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. Persuasive, deeply researched account of wool workers after the Ciompi revolt that distinguishes the socio-professional status of different categories of workers within the industry. Concludes that worker solidarity weakened in the early 15th century, thereby easing social tensions.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Franceschi, Franco. “Les enfants au travail dans l’industrie textile Florentine des XIVe et XVe siècles.” Médiévales 30 (1996): 69–82.
  562. DOI: 10.3406/medi.1996.1353Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. Documents the fundamental role child labor played in sustaining the booming textile industry. Assesses patterns of age and immigration, wages, skills, and the organization of labor.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Frick, Carole Collier. Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
  566. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  567. In-depth study of the Renaissance fashion industry, exploring issues of manufacturing, guild organization, prices, and the social and political meanings of clothing.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
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  571. Magisterial study of the Florentine construction industry on the basis of exhaustive archival research. Argues that industry, art, and technology combined with the wealth of private patrons to fuel a building boom that transformed the Florentine cityscape in the 15th century.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Hoshino, Hidetoshi. L’arte della lana in Firenze nel basso medioevo: Il commercio della lana e il mercato dei panni fiorentini nei secoli XIII–XV. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1980.
  574. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. Foundational study of the organization of the Florentine wool industry, which served as the city’s lifeblood from the 13th century onward.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Religion
  578.  
  579. The Florentine Church and the city’s religious life remain the most underexplored areas in an otherwise immense body of scholarship. That picture is changing rapidly as scholars turn to the rich records left by lay confraternities, monasteries, and convents, and charitable institutions as indices to the tenor of Florentine religiosity.
  580.  
  581. The Florentine Church as an Institution
  582.  
  583. Dameron 2005 sets the stage for understanding trajectories of change, with a stimulating examination of the Florentine Church in the age of Dante. Bizzocchi 1987 takes the story forward in time, showing how urban elites came to dominate ecclesiastical offices in the 15th century. Peterson 1989 provides a lucid examination of competing political interests at work in the election of Archbishop Antoninus in the mid-15th century, while Brucker 1985 focuses on the social position of parish clergy. D’Addario 1972 considers aspects of local institutional reform in the wider context of 16th-century Italy.
  584.  
  585. Bizzocchi, Roberto. Chiesa e potere nella Toscana del Quattrocento. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1987.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. Important, sophisticated consideration of how the Florentine Church acquired greater power and prominence through its alliance with, and domination by, local elites in the 15th century.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Brucker, Gene A. “Urban Parishes and their Clergy in Quattrocento Florence: A Preliminary ‘Sondage.’” In Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth. Vol. 1. Edited by Andrew Morrogh, 17–28. Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1985.
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  591. Useful look at the nature and structure of Florentine parishes, and at the social status and background of the priests who staffed them.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. D’Addario, Arnaldo. Aspetti della controriforma a Firenze. Rome: Ministero dell’Interno, 1972.
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. Fundamental study of 16th-century ecclesiastical reform in the Florentine diocese, recounted mainly from an institutional and political standpoint.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Dameron, George W. Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
  598. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. In-depth look at the structure of the Florentine Church, the nature of spirituality and lay piety, ecclesiastical rituals, and church-state relations between 1250 and roughly 1330.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Peterson, David S. “An Episcopal Election in Quattrocento Florence.” In Popes, Teachers, and Canon Law in the Middle Ages. Edited by James Ross Sweeney and Stanley Chodorow, 300–325. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
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  603. Deeply researched article that illuminates the complex political and social dynamics surrounding the election of the saintly Dominican friar Antoninus Pierozzi as archbishop of Florence in 1445.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Sources
  606.  
  607. Lami 1758 collects a vast number of episcopal decrees, synodal legislation, some correspondence, and descriptions of church rituals, mainly written in Latin. Trexler 1971 publishes two centuries of synodal legislation in the adjacent dioceses of Florence and Fiesole, with extended commentary.
  608.  
  609. Lami, Giovanni. Sanctae ecclesiae Florentinae monumenta. 3 vols. Florence: Ex Typographio Deiparae ab Angelo Salutatae, 1758.
  610. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  611. Fundamental documents for reconstructing and analyzing the history of the Florentine Church.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. Trexler, Richard C. Synodal Law in Florence and Fiesole, 1306–1518. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1971.
  614. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  615. Comparison of synodal legislation in these adjacent dioceses, with extended commentary.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Confraternities, Charity, and Social Welfare
  618.  
  619. Renaissance Florence was in the vanguard in setting up new mechanisms for social welfare, but scholars disagree about the nature of those institutions and why they were established. In a study of the civic foundling hospital, Gavitt 1990 attempts to counter views that Florence, with its pronounced masculinist values, preferentially practiced female infanticide. Gavitt 2011 returns to the history of this foundling home in the 16th century to argue that the ideology of lineage, not the ideology of gender, was the primary driving force behind its expansion. Terpstra 2005 offers a compelling portrait of a wider array of Florentine orphanages, which by the 16th century came to resemble workhouses. Trexler 1993 showcases tensions between the paternalism of the Florentine commune in establishing a widow’s asylum and the ways this custodial institution supported normative household arrangements. Menning 1993 addresses another civic charity, the monte di pieta, originally founded to counterbalance Jewish pawnbrokers. Turning to confraternities, Weissman 1982 sees lay religious brotherhoods as helping to assuage the agonistic qualities of Florentine society, whereas Henderson 1997 offers a more benign view focusing on the self-help and charitable impulses of confraternal brothers.
  620.  
  621. Gavitt, Philip. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
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  623. Using both archival and literary sources, argues that this innovative civic orphanage was a family-modeled institution that reflected a profoundly child-centered culture. Includes explanations of day-to-day operations and some case studies of orphans.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Gavitt, Philip. Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  626. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511976797Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  627. Examines the social role of charitable institutions for women and children—Italy’s most visible social problem in the 16th century. Argues that Florentine elites used expanding custodial institutions in line with lineage ideology, which often was at odds with other charitable goals.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Henderson, John. Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
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  631. Thorough study of the city’s many religious brotherhoods devoted to devotional activities such as the singing of lauds, as well as their charitable initiatives surrounding poor relief, burying the dead, and giving financial aid to widows and minors.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Menning, Carol Bresnahan. Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pietà of Florence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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  635. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, examines the evolution of the monte di pieta from a small charitable pawnshop founded in 1495 to a flourishing savings bank and a powerful instrument of patronage and state finance under the early Medici dukes.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Terpstra, Nicholas. Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
  638. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  639. Excellent comparative study of the organization and social objectives of orphanages in Florence and Bologna that also covers the life experiences of abandoned children. Demonstrates that Bologna’s orphanages were better run and reintegrated their wards into society more successfully than the larger, more harshly disciplined Florentine institutions.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Trexler, Richard C. “A Widow’s Asylum of the Renaissance: The Orbatello of Florence.” In Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence. Vol. 2, The Women of Renaissance Florence. Edited by Richard C. Trexler, 66–93. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993.
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  643. Pioneering study of the innovative civic shelter established c. 1370 to provide free housing for elderly widows. Reviews the shelter’s demographic patterns, work and living arrangements for inmates, social goals, and issues of governance.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Weissman, Ronald F. E. Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1982.
  646. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  647. Provocative analysis of the city’s many confraternities, arguing that these lay religious associations helped offset some of the pronounced competitive and agonistic features of the Florentine social world.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Churches, Convents, and Monasteries
  650.  
  651. Local churches and monastic institutions commanded extensive economic resources as well as deep social allegiances. Most studies, to date, focus on individual churches, monasteries, or convents, despite the richness of monastic archives, which permits a broad evaluation. Richa 1754–1762 provides the basic foundation for understanding the history of Florentine churches, while Paatz and Paatz 1952–1955 delineates their artistic and architectural patrimony. The numerous essays in Verdon and Innocenti 2001 offer up-to-date studies of the history, liturgy, art, and patronage of Florence’s landmark cathedral. Brucker 1990 offers a succinct survey of the city’s monastic institutions, both male and female, in the 15th century. Lowe 2003 investigates issues of convent culture and identity through the lens of nuns’ chronicles, while Strocchia 2009 considers how female monasticism, especially its sociopolitical and economic features, formed the backbone for many defining characteristics of Renaissance Florence.
  652.  
  653. Brucker, Gene A. “Monasteries, Friaries, and Nunneries in Quattrocento Florence.” In Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, 41–62. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990.
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  655. Valuable overview of the demographic, economic, and social dimensions of 15th-century Florentine monasticism, by using tax reports, visitation records, and other documents of practice. Illuminates the wide variety of institutional fortunes and experiences that characterized Renaissance monasticism.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Lowe, K. J. P. Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  658. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  659. Analyzes commonalities and differences in 16th-century Italian convent culture, through the lens of three convent chronicles written by nuns in Florence, Venice, and Rome. Demonstrates that nuns fashioned and preserved individual and convent identities by writing the histories of their own religious houses.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Paatz, Walter, and Elisabeth Paatz. Die Kirchen von Florenz, ein kunstgeschichtliches Handbuch. 5 vols. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1952–1955.
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  663. Essential, critical reference work for the art and architecture of Florentine churches, arranged alphabetically. Identifies and describes extant and now-lost works of art made for or associated with each church.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Richa, Giuseppe. Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, divise ne’ suoi quartieri. 10 vols. Florence: P. G. Viviani, 1754–1762.
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  667. Fundamental reference work reviewing the history of all the city’s churches, written by one of the leading cleric-scholars of his day. Arranged by geographical quarter; incorporates some now-lost archival material. Reprinted in 1972 (Rome: Multigrafica Editrice).
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Strocchia, Sharon T. Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
  670. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  671. First in-depth study of the sociopolitical features of Florentine convents and nuns’ contributions to the urban economy from 1350 to 1530, on the basis of extensive archival research. Shows how nuns and nunneries were central to the formation of several defining features of Renaissance Florence.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Verdon, Timothy, and Annalisa Innocenti. La cattedrale e la città: Saggi sul Duomo di Firenze. 3 vols. Florence: Edifir, 2001.
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  675. Expanded proceedings of conference celebrating the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Florentine cathedral. Critically examines aspects of church-state relations and the place of the cathedral in the Florentine social world (Vol. 1), art and sacred space (Vol. 2), and sacred music (Vol. 3).
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Source
  678.  
  679. Written by a professed nun in the Benedictine convent of Le Murate, Niccolini 2011 is a remarkable history of Florence’s premier female religious house, spanning two centuries, on the basis of original documents that are now lost.
  680.  
  681. Niccolini, Giustina. The Chronicle of Le Murate. Edited and translated by Saundra Weddle. Other Voice in Early Modern Europe 12. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011.
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  683. Recounts the history of Florence’s largest convent from its inception as a small hermitage c. 1400 to an imposing physical complex occupied by almost two hundred nuns in 1598. Using now-lost documents, offers a precious window on the spiritual aspirations, interpersonal relationships, and gritty realities of convent life.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. The Savonarolan Movement
  686.  
  687. One of the figures most closely associated with Florentine religious experience was the fiery Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola (b. 1452–d. 1498). Weinstein 1970 still provides the best introduction to the preacher’s life and the formative impact of Florentine civic traditions on his religious ideas. Martines 2006 offers an updated, absorbing account of this often-misunderstood figure, while Dall’Aglio 2010 gives new insights into the preacher’s historical milieu and cultural legacy. Polizzotto 1993 and Polizzotto 1994 treat the perpetuation of Savonarolan ideas in the half-century after his death and the struggle to control the preacher’s legacy. Di Agresti 1980 focuses on the long-term impact of Savonarolan reform on local monastic institutions, especially female convents. Macey 1998 considers how music, particularly in Tuscan convents, helped sustain the movement, while Strocchia 2007 illuminates how nuns’ necrologies kept Savonarolan ideals alive, yet at the same time the author exposes significant tensions between nuns and their monastic supervisors. The wide-ranging essays in Garfagnini 1996 treat the social, political, and cultural milieu of the preacher and his movement.
  688.  
  689. Dall’Aglio, Stefano. Savonarola and Savonarolism. Translated by John Gagné. Essays and Studies 24. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010.
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  691. Excellent general introduction to the preacher’s life and thought; his historical milieu; and his political, religious, and cultural legacy. Useful for undergraduates and general readers. English translation of Savonarola e il savonarolismo (Bari, Italy: Cacucci, 2005).
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Di Agresti, Domenico. Sviluppi della riforma monastica savonaroliana. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1980.
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  695. Important study of how Savonarola’s adherents reformed monastic institutions, both male and female, in keeping with his ideals. Includes lengthy excerpts from previously unpublished archival documents.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo, ed. Studi savonaroliani: Verso il V centenario. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1996.
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  699. Excellent critical reappraisals connected with the 500th anniversary of the preacher’s death, written by Italian and anglophone scholars, both young and well established, and grouped around three themes: Savonarola and Florence, culture in the preacher’s heyday, and the Savonarolan movement.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Macey, Patrick Paul. Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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  703. Shows how musical texts and settings helped form a distinctive Savonarolan identity, especially in female religious houses associated with the movement.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Martines, Lauro. Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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  707. Gripping narrative account of Savonarola both as a preacher and political figure, on the basis of solid scholarly foundations. Recommended for general readers, students, and specialists.
  708. Find this resource:
  709. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. “When Saints Fall Out: Women and the Savonarolan Reform in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence.” Renaissance Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 486–525.
  710. DOI: 10.2307/3039103Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  711. Documents the internecine battles raging within the Savonarolan movement in the 1510s and 1520s for control of the preacher’s legacy—a struggle that centered on two holy women who represented differing visions of women’s public religious voice.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Polizzotto, Lorenzo. The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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  715. Definitive treatment of the Savonarolan legacy in the half-century following the preacher’s execution in 1498. Examines political conflicts between adherents and the Medici and illuminates how the movement managed to survive despite continued persecution.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Strocchia, Sharon T. “Savonarolan Witnesses: The Nuns of San Jacopo and the Piagnone Movement in Sixteenth-Century Florence.” Sixteenth Century Journal 38.2 (2007): 393–418.
  718. DOI: 10.2307/20478366Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  719. Demonstrates that internal convent records such as nuns’ obituaries celebrating Savonarolan religious values helped keep the movement alive until the end of the 16th century. Illuminates recurrent tensions between nuns affiliated with the movement and their superiors over issues of self-governance and women’s role in reform.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Weinstein, Donald. Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.
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  723. Classic study by the American dean of Savonarola scholars, showing how this Ferrarese Dominican preacher was transformed by Florentine republicanism and civic traditions, shifting from a preacher of apocalyptic despair to a prophet of the millennium and a visionary of Florentine glory.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Intellectual Culture
  726.  
  727. Renowned as the cradle of early Renaissance humanism, Florence gave birth to several varieties of humanist and political thought, the most prominent of which are commonly associated with republican values. Complementing this long-standing interest in high intellectual culture are more-recent studies by social historians interested in vernacular learning and literacy.
  728.  
  729. Humanism
  730.  
  731. Florentine humanism has been traditionally viewed through the prism of civic humanism, despite other vigorous currents such as Neoplatonism. Baron 1955 forged an enduring link between politics and humanism by postulating that the threat of Milanese tyrants c. 1400 evoked an ardent defense of republican ideals by humanist chancellors. This provocative thesis receives careful reconsideration by a new generation of scholars in Hankins 2000. Witt 1983 delineates the contributions of Coluccio Salutati to a nascent civic humanism, while Brown 1979 looks at its fruition and adaptation in the late 15th century. Martines 1963 remains the classic study of the social relationships forged by humanists. Field 1988 explores the foundation of the Platonic academy and argues for its continued engagement with the major political concerns of its day. Maxson 2014 maintains that hundreds of classical enthusiasts who did not have a comprehensive humanist education nevertheless facilitated the success and spread of the humanist movement.
  732.  
  733. Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955.
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  735. Classic, indispensible study that links the development of Florentine civic humanism by the early-15th-century chancellors Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni to external threats by the Visconti dukes of Milan, which evoked a defense of Florentine republican ideals. Second revised edition published in 1966.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Brown, Alison. Bartolomeo Scala, 1430–1497, Chancellor of Florence: The Humanist as Bureaucrat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
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  739. Insightful study of this chancellor, who served for thirty-two years under the Medici and effectively combined political activities as an administrator with literary pursuits as a humanist scholar.
  740. Find this resource:
  741. Field, Arthur. The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
  742. DOI: 10.1515/9781400859764Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  743. Major study of the Platonic academy founded by Cosimo de’ Medici in the early 1460s, which helped shape the literary and artistic culture of Renaissance Florence. Argues that Florentine intellectuals did not propagate Platonic truths in isolation but instead engaged with common civic concerns.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Hankins, James, ed. Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  746. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558474Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  747. Ten essays by leading scholars that reexamine earlier historiography treating Florentine civic humanism in light of more-recent scholarship and new analytical categories.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Martines, Lauro. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
  750. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  751. Foundational work analyzing the social background of Florentine humanists and their career paths, marriage alliances, and social networks, on the basis of meticulous archival research.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Maxson, Brian Jeffrey. The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
  754. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  755. Examines the learned interests of several hundred so-called amateur humanists, many of whom could not read classical Latin, but whose passion for Antiquity nevertheless encouraged the spread and success of the humanist movement.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Witt, Ronald G. Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983.
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  759. Definitive modern study of this early humanist and Florentine chancellor that situates his intellectual development in its historical milieu and brings his moral conflicts to life.
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Sources
  762.  
  763. The selected texts written by one of the famed Florentine chancellor and civic humanist Leonardo Bruni are framed by illuminating introductions and commentary in Griffiths, et al. 1987.
  764.  
  765. Griffiths, Gordon, James Hankins, and David Thompson, trans. The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987.
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  767. Excellent anthology representing Bruni’s major works in translation, with helpful introductions to each text.
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Political Thought
  770.  
  771. Two names immediately spring to mind in connection with the development of political thought in Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. Gilbert 1965 remains a useful comparison of the intellectual relationship shared by the two men. De Grazia 1989 lifts up the complex links between Machiavelli’s personal experiences and his political ideas. Both Hulliung 1983 and Viroli 1998 emphasize the classical republican elements running throughout Machiavelli’s corpus. Pocock 1975 and Bock, et al. 1990 assess Machiavelli’s thought in the context of the broader European republican tradition and his long-term legacy. Najemy 1993 offers a close reading of the formative correspondence Machiavelli exchanged with his friend Vettori, while Pitkin 1984 probes the gendered aspects of Machiavelli’s rhetoric and political constructs.
  772.  
  773. Bock, Gisela, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds. Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  774. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  775. Collection of fifteen essays by leading scholars, assessing Machiavelli’s political thought in the larger context of the European republican tradition.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. De Grazia, Sebastian. Machiavelli in Hell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
  778. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  779. Magisterial, prize-winning intellectual biography that deftly illuminates how Machiavelli’s personal experiences helped shape his political ideas and views of the world.
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Gilbert, Felix. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.
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  783. Classic analysis of the intellectual relationship between these two giants—Machiavelli in political thought, Guicciardini in writing history—arguing that each man was a harbinger of modern principles in his respective sphere of interest.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Hulliung, Mark. Citizen Machiavelli. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
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  787. Attempts to debunk common myths about Machiavelli’s thought and the historical uses to which it has been put. Emphasizes the neoclassical and republican elements running throughout Machiavelli’s entire corpus.
  788. Find this resource:
  789. Najemy, John. Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
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  791. Close reading of the letters exchanged from 1513 to 1515 by Machiavelli and his friend Francesco Vettori, demonstrating the importance of this epistolary conversation to the development of Machiavelli’s major works on politics.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Pitkin, Hannah F. Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
  794. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  795. Perceptive, complex book that deepens our understanding of Machiavelli’s political thought by lifting up the gendered foundations of his rhetoric and conceptualizations.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
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  799. Essential study of the modern consequences of the classical republican ideal revived by Machiavelli, among others, arguing that the American Revolution can be considered the last act of Renaissance civic humanism.
  800. Find this resource:
  801. Viroli, Maurizio. Machiavelli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  802. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198780885.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  803. Places Machiavelli squarely in the tradition of classical republicanism dating back to Cicero, sometimes glossing over evidence to the contrary.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Vernacular Learning, Literacy, and Literature
  806.  
  807. The demands of business and commerce fostered the acquisition and spread of vernacular literacy, both reading and writing. Bryce 2005 and Crabb 2007 examine the form and function of women’s literate activities. Bec 1984 inventories the holdings of more than five hundred private libraries to evaluate Florentine reading habits; Conway 1999 looks at the publications issued by the Ripoli press as well as their customers.
  808.  
  809. Bec, Christian. Les livres des Florentines (1413–1608). Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1984.
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  811. Offers a statistical profile of the books Florentines owned, compiled from estate inventories, totaling 582 private libraries. Aims to portray the reading habits of the general public rather than intellectuals, focusing on four discrete periods that track continuities and changes over time.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Bryce, Judith. “‘Les livres des Florentines’: Reconsidering Women’s Literacy in Quattrocento Florence.” In At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy. Edited by Stephen J. Milner, 131–161. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
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  815. Informative study that revisits questions about the nature and extent of women’s literacy from a qualitative perspective, emphasizing the varied uses to which literacy was put and the central place of devotional reading in female culture.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Conway, Melissa. The Diario of the Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli (1476–1484). Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999.
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  819. Most up-to-date study of the second printing press established in Florence, this one at the Dominican convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli. Transcribes the central account book and analyzes subject titles, the vast majority of which were vernacular devotional works, print runs, and customers.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Crabb, Ann M. “‘If I Could Write’: Margherita Datini and Letter Writing, 1385–1410.” Renaissance Quarterly 60.4 (2007): 1170–1206.
  822. DOI: 10.1353/ren.2007.0459Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  823. Examines Margherita Datini’s correspondence with her wealthy merchant husband, Francesco, which documents her progress from partial to full literacy. Shows the importance of letter writing in the merchant world, and that Margherita was writing at twenty-eight, earlier than previously thought, attaining full literacy in her mid-thirties.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Sources
  826.  
  827. Fifteenth-century Florentine literature written in the vernacular gravitated toward one of two poles: devotional and chivalric. Pulci 2010 and Tornabuoni 2001 represent the first; Pulci 2000, the second.
  828.  
  829. Pulci, Luigi. Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante. Translated by Joseph Tusiani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
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  831. Comic masterpiece recounting the early adventures of the French knight Roland (Orlando) and the giant Morgante.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Pulci, Antonia. Saints’ Lives and Bible Stories for the Stage. Edited by Elissa B. Weaver. Translated by James Wyatt Cook. Other Voice in Early Modern Europe 7. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010.
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  835. Bilingual edition of five one-act plays, many featuring early Christian female martyrs as their heroines, written by a gifted 15th-century dramatist to be performed by nuns for female audiences. Includes three short documentary appendixes in English and Italian. Revised edition of Antonia Pulci’s Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
  836. Find this resource:
  837. Tornabuoni, Lucrezia. Sacred Narratives. Translated and edited by Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
  838. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226808574.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  839. First major collection in any language of Tornabuoni’s extensive body of religious poems. Includes nine laude (poems of praise) and five storie sacre, narrative poems based on the lives of biblical figures, three of whom—Judith, Susanna, and Esther—are Old Testament heroines.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. The Arts
  842.  
  843. Renaissance Florence exerts an enduring fascination in large part because of its artistic achievements. Because the city’s pantheon of artists is so extensive, this section serves merely as an introduction to some of the major issues and areas of inquiry in the visual arts, music, and theater.
  844.  
  845. General and Painting
  846.  
  847. Partridge 2009 provides a useful overview of the major artworks produced in 15th- and 16th-century Florence. Goldthwaite 1993 inquires into the economic conditions that fostered the proliferation of art in Renaissance Italy, while Thomas 1995 approaches paintings as the end result of social and economic negotiations. Rubin 2007 probes the relationships between the production of images and social identities; Kent 2000 offers a detailed study of one of the most famous art patrons of his day. Nagel 2000 situates Michelangelo’s fascination with the figure of the dead Christ in the context of 16th-century religious reform. Eckstein 2007 similarly contextualizes the famed Brancacci chapel in its historical setting.
  848.  
  849. Eckstein, Nicholas A., ed. The Brancacci Chapel: Form, Function, and Setting. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007.
  850. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  851. Ten interdisciplinary essays that offer fresh perspectives on one of the most studied masterpieces of the early Florentine Renaissance.
  852. Find this resource:
  853. Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
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  855. Bold, original study that addresses the economic and social question of why Italy produced so much art in the Renaissance. Argues that the increasing demand to “fill up” ecclesiastical, domestic, and public spaces helps explain this remarkable proliferation, which foreshadows modern consumerism.
  856. Find this resource:
  857. Kent, Dale. Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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  859. Comprehensive, richly documented study examining virtually every facet of Medicean patronage between 1420 and 1464. Explicates the civic, religious, personal, and dynastic impulses that undergird Cosimo’s numerous sacred and secular commissions.
  860. Find this resource:
  861. Nagel, Alexander. Michelangelo and the Reform of Art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  863. Studies Michelangelo’s associations with reform-minded circles in 16th-century Italy and positions the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the image of the dead Christ within this climate of religious reform.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Partridge, Loren. Art of Renaissance Florence, 1400–1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
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  867. Well-illustrated volume examining the city’s great architectural and artistic achievements in their political, intellectual, and religious contexts. Incorporates insights from then-recent scholarship, including gender studies, while emphasizing the artists’ social status, rivalries, and innovations. Useful for students and general readers.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Rubin, Patricia L. Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
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  871. Interdisciplinary examination of the place of images in Florentine society, analyzing why works of art were made, who made and commissioned them, and how they looked and were looked at. Explores places of exchange—churches, palaces, squares—where identities were constructed and transformed, often through the mediation of images.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Thomas, Anabel. The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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  875. Focuses on paintings not only as art but also as products of a process of manufacture. Examines the commissioning, production, and marketing of paintings; how subjects and their style were decided; constraints on cost and design; and the division of labor within and among workshops.
  876. Find this resource:
  877. Architecture, Sculpture, and Urbanism
  878.  
  879. Rubinstein 1995, Trachtenberg 1997, and King 2000 consider the design principles and rational urban planning inherent in two of the city’s most significant monuments: the city hall and its surrounding square, and the cathedral (especially its marvelous dome) and its square. Randolph 2002 explores the multivalent symbolism inherent in the sculpture of Donatello, while Krautheimer 1983 offers a comprehensive look at the sculpture of his contemporary, Ghiberti. Cornelison 2012 provides an exhaustive study of the monuments honoring the saintly Florentine archbishop Antoninus, whose memory was intimately bound up with the city’s identity.
  880.  
  881. Cornelison, Sally J. Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence. Visual Culture in Early Modernity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012.
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  883. Meticulously researched account of the cult of Florence’s saintly archbishop, and the monuments constructed to honor his relics, from his death in 1459 to the completion of a grandiose chapel in San Marco in 1591.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. King, Ross. Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. New York: Walker, 2000.
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  887. Popular work that interweaves the story of Filippo Brunelleschi’s remarkable engineering feats in constructing the landmark dome of the Florentine cathedral with political intrigues surrounding its execution in the early 15th century. Useful for undergraduates and general readers.
  888. Find this resource:
  889. Krautheimer, Richard. Lorenzo Ghiberti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
  890. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  891. Comprehensive, foundational study of the oeuvre created by the early-15th-century sculptor best known for his work on the doors of the Florentine Baptistry, later dubbed the “Gates of Paradise.”
  892. Find this resource:
  893. Randolph, Adrian W. B. Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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  895. Sophisticated study illuminating the complexities of symbolism inherent in Renaissance sculpture, mainly through an examination of Donatello’s sculpture. Shows how the ambiguities of sculptural representations, including their gendered meanings, were activated in and by particular spatial settings and social contexts such as private courtyards and public squares.
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Rubinstein, Nicolai. The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
  898. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  899. Impressive exploration of the political uses of architecture and images by a preeminent history, illuminating the ways in which the Palazzo Vecchio functioned as the seat of the Florentine republican government.
  900. Find this resource:
  901. Trachtenberg, Marvin. Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  903. Examines the urban transformation of Florence in the 14th century, focusing on the creation of the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza del Duomo. Documents how and why urban planners, in concert with the civic government, enlarged these urban spaces, countering the received claim that rational planning began only in the 15th century.
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Music and Performance
  906.  
  907. Music came into its own as a sophisticated secular art form after 1500. Wilson 1992 examines the spiritual hymns sung by 15th-century merchant confraternities; Tacconi 2005 studies the texts and music used for liturgical services at the Florentine cathedral. D’Accone 2007 considers new musical forms in traditional church spaces. Cummings 1992 illuminates the music that formed part of Medici festivals on the cusp of their elevation to the principate, while Cusick 2009 explores how music written by a female composer enhanced the political agenda of the Medici court.
  908.  
  909. Cummings, Anthony M. The Politicized Muse: Music for Medici Festivals, 1512–1537. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
  910. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  911. Reconstructs the music, art, and literature written for splendid public festivals sponsored by the Medici after their restoration to power in 1512, which conveyed important political messages to observers.
  912. Find this resource:
  913. Cusick, Suzanne G. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  914. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  915. Fascinating study of this composer and performer, who worked at the Medici court for thirty years and was the first woman to compose opera. Argues that Caccini’s career depended on the usefulness of her talents to the political agenda of Christine de Lorraine, de facto regent from 1606 to 1636.
  916. Find this resource:
  917. D’Accone, Frank A. Music and Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
  918. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  919. Selected essays by a prominent musicologist tracing the development of musical chapels at the Florentine cathedral and Baptistery, as well as musical establishments at the churches of SS. Annunziata, San Lorenzo, and Santa Maria Novella. Studies the lives and careers of composers associated with these churches, analyzing their works.
  920. Find this resource:
  921. Tacconi, Marica S. Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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  923. Comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of the sixty-five extant liturgical manuscripts produced for the Florentine cathedral between 1150 and 1526, which provided the texts and music necessary for the celebration of liturgical services.
  924. Find this resource:
  925. Wilson, Blake. Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
  926. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  927. Examines the musical and liturgical practices of Florentine singing confraternities within their religious, social, and economic context.
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