Beyond Florence

by Findlen, Paula; Fontaine, Michelle; Osheim, Duane J.

• ISBN13: 9780804739351
• ISBN10: 0804739358
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-10
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florenceas a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the "Florentine model" to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial lifethe "many Italies" that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field. At the volume's core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period? In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.

Author Biography

Paula Findlen is Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Michelle M. Fontaine is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Duane J. Osheim is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of A Tuscan Monastery and Its Social World.

Table of Contents

Maps and Figures	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
About the Contributors	xi
Preface	xv
PART ONE. FLORENCE, ITALY, AND THE RENAISSANCE	1	(28)
Florence Redux	5	(8)
Gene Brucker
In and Out of Florence	13	(16)
Paula Findlen
PART TWO. CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE	29	(52)
The Other Florence Within Florence	33	(12)
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
A World of Its Own: Economy, Society, and Religious Life in the Tuscan Mugello at the Time of Dante	45	(14)
George Dameron
The Country Parish at Late Medieval Lucca	59	(13)
Duane J. Osheim
``Do Not Say That This Is a Man from Assisi''	72	(9)
Robert Brentano
PART THREE. LAW AND SOCIETY	81	(34)
Concubines, Lovers, Prostitutes: Infamy and Female Identity in Medieval Bologna	85	(16)
Carol Lansing
Lost Faith: A Roman Prosecutor Reflects on Notaries' Crimes	101	(14)
Laurie Nussdorfer
PART FOUR. URBAN AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES	115	(62)
Pilgrim-Tourism in Late Medieval Venice	119	(14)
Robert C. Davis
The Hermit Returns: Sanctity and the City in the March of Ancona	133	(14)
Robert L. Cooper
In the Shop of the Lord: Bernardino of Siena and Popular Devotion	147	(13)
Cynthia L. Polecritti
``Angels of Peace'': The Social Drama of the Jesuit Mission in Early Modern Southern Italy	160	(17)
Jennifer D. Selwyn
PART FIVE. TOPOGRAPHIES OF POWER	177	(56)
Topographies of Power in the Urban Centers of Medieval Italy: Communes, Bishops, and Public Authority	181	(9)
Maureen C. Miller
In Search of the Quiet City: Civic Identity and Papal State Building in Fourteenth-Century Orvieto	190	(15)
David Foote
Back to the Future: Remaking the Commune in Ducal Modena	205	(14)
Michelle M. Fontaine
The Spanish Foundations of Late Renaissance and Baroque Rome	219	(14)
Thomas Dandelet
Afterword Where Is Beyond Florence?	233	(10)
Randolph Starn
Notes	243	(40)
Bibliography	283	(32)
Index	315