Benjamin G. Kohl begins by describing Padua's late medieval setting, exploring the geographic and institutional givens inherited by the early Carrara lords as they fought to maintain their city's independence. He then offers a detailed analysis of the Carrara's century-long relationship with their powerful neighbor, Venice - sometimes protector and sometimes nemesis. Kohl examines the changing composition of the Carrara family relationships, as well as the regime's household government, its economic and landed interests, investments in textiles and trade, and the development of its own mint and tax system. By providing a nuanced view of the growth of state power in the hands of a single dynasty, Kohl lays to rest the received view of the lawless Renaissance despot.

This book focuses on the reception of classical political ideas in the political thought of the fourteenth-century Italian writer Marsilius of Padua. Vasileios Syros provides a novel cross-cultural perspective on Marsilius’s theory and breaks fresh ground by exploring linkages between his ideas and the medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Byzantine traditions. Syros investigates Marsilius’s application of medical metaphors in his discussion of the causes of civil strife and the desirable political organization. He also demonstrates how Marsilius’s demarcation between ethics and politics and his use of examples from Greek mythology foreshadow early modern political debates (involving such prominent political authors as Niccolò Machiavelli and Paolo Sarpi) about the political dimension of religion, church-state relations, and the emergence and decline of the state.

Crises are never the best of times and the era of the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) easily qualifies as one of the worst of times. As a professor of canon law at the University of Padua and later cardinal, and as a major theorist in the conciliarist movement, Franciscus Zabarella (1360-1417) tried to do what a good legal mind does: find and explicate a viable and legal solution to the crises of his time, a solution that would stand up in his own era and for the generations that followed. In this volume Thomas Morrissey looks at what he said, wrote and did, and places him and his thought in the context of the late medieval and early modern era, how he reflected that world and how he influenced it. Particular studies elucidate what he wrote on the authority and on the duty of the people in power, what they could do and should do, as well as what they should not do. They also show how he explored the area of early constitution law and human rights in civil and religious society and that his work leads down the road to our modern constitutional democratic societies. The volume includes two previously unpublished studies, on the situation in Padua c. 1400 and on a sermon from 1407, together with an introduction contextualizing the articles.

Traces the intellectual life of Italy, where humanism began a century before it influenced the rest of Europe.

The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.

In this, the first comprehensive study of city-states in medieval Europe, Tom Scott analyzes reasons for cities' aquisitions of territory and how they were governed. He argues that city-states did not wither after 1500, but survived by transformation and adaption.

"The twelve essays in this volume present an introduction to Italian Renaissance society, intellectual history, and politics" -- provided by publisher.