Drawing on extensive archival evidence, Carol Bresnahan Menning examines the remarkable evolution of the Florentine monte from a small charitable pawnshop to a flourishing savings organization and a powerful instrument of patronage and state finance.

This book examines the important social role of charitable institutions for women and children in late Renaissance Florence. Wars, social unrest, disease, and growing economic inequality on the Italian peninsula displaced hundreds of thousands of families during this period. In order to handle the social crises generated by war, competition for social position, and the abandonment of children, a series of private and public initiatives expanded existing charitable institutions and founded new ones. Philip Gavitt's research reveals the important role played by lineage ideology among Florence's elites in the use and manipulation of these charitable institutions in the often futile pursuit of economic and social stability. Considering families of all social levels, he argues that the pursuit of family wealth and prestige often worked at cross-purposes with the survival of the very families it was supposed to preserve.

Drawing on a wide body of internationally-renowned scholars, including a core of Italians, this volume focuses on new material and puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. All stages of the judicial process are addressed, from the drafting of new laws to the rounding-up of bandits. Attention is paid both to common crime and to more historically specific crimes, such as sumptuary laws. Attempts to prevent or suppress disorder in private and public life are analysed, and many different types of crime, from the sexual to the political and from the verbal to the physical, are considered. In sum the volume aims to demonstrate the fundamental importance of crime and disorder for the study of the Italian Renaissance. It is the only single-volume treatment available of the subject in English. Other books have studied crime in a single city, or single types of crime, but few have presented a cross-section of articles which deploy diverse methodological approaches in material from many parts of the peninsula.

The first to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this book focuses on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material. This study draws on a range of fields and examines a wide variety of visual forms -including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries - to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.

Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy places St. Angela Merici and her Company of St. Ursula in historical and religious context and examines them from a variety of perspectives: institutional, social, spiritual, and cultural.

Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. This wide-ranging volume explores patrimony in legal thought and how family property was inherited, managed and shared legally and its central role in Renaissance Italy.

"The eleven articles by leading historians included in this collection engage with a variety of topics and microhistories that touch on some of the most important aspects of pre-modern Italian life (1400-1700): charity, finance, inheritance, sociability, dowries and family strategies, public performance, and illness and its cures. The book is divided into four sections: charity and economy, culture and society, family and inheritance, and medicine and health. All of the articles are firmly grounded in original archival research while, at the same time, engaging with the rich and complex array of secondary scholarship in the area."--