Uses Piero de' Medici's life as a prism to throw new light on the crisis in Renaissance Italy that revolutionised culture and political thinking.

The innovative city culture of Florence was the crucible within which Renaissance ideas first caught fire. With its soaring cathedral dome and its classically-inspired palaces and piazzas, it is perhaps the finest single expression of a society that is still at its heart an urban one. For, as Brian Jeffrey Maxson reveals, it is above all the city-state – the walled commune which became the chief driver of European commerce, culture, banking and art – that is medieval Italy's enduring legacy to the present. Charting the transition of Florence from an obscure Guelph republic to a regional superpower in which the glittering court of Lorenzo the Magnificent became the pride and envy of the continent, the author authoritatively discusses a city that looked to the past for ideas even as it articulated a novel creativity. Uncovering passionate dispute and intrigue, Maxson sheds fresh light too on seminal events like the fiery end of oratorical firebrand Savonarola and Giuliano de' Medici's brutal murder by the rival Pazzi family. This book shows why Florence, harbinger and heartland of the Renaissance, is and has always been unique.

Ten essays by eminent scholars in Renaissance studies to celebrate the work of Robert Black. These essays analyze education, humanism, political thought, printing, and the visual arts during this key period in their development.

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance library With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo—a “little studio”—and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul. Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo’s influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. Beautifully illustrated, The Study is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.

Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–50), was a Florentine cardinal, nephew and cousin to the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, and he owed his status and wealth to their patronage. He remained actively engaged in Florentine politics, above all during the years of crisis that saw the Florentine state change from republic to duchy. A widely respected patron and scholar throughout his life, his sudden death during the conclave of 1549–50 led to allegations of poison that an autopsy appears to confirm. This book examines Cardinal Ridolfi and his court in order to understand the extent to which cardinalate courts played a key part in Rome’s resurgence and acted as hubs of knowledge located on the fault lines of politics and reform in church and state, hospitable spaces that can be analysed in the context of entanglements in Florentine and Roman cultural and political patronage, and intersections between the princely court and a more professional and complex knowledge and practice of household management in the consumer and service economy of early modern Rome. Based on an array of archival sources and on three treatises whose authors were closely linked to Ridolfi’s court, this monograph explores these multidisciplinary intersections to allow the more traditional fields of church and political history to be approached from different angles. Niccolò Ridolfi and the Cardinal's Court will appeal to all those interested in the organisation of these elite establishments and their place in sixteenth-century Roman society, the life and patronage of Niccolò Ridolfi in the context of the Florentine exiles who desired a return to republicanism, and the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

Miles Unger's biography of this complex figure draws on primary research in Italian sources and on his intimate knowledge of Florence, where he lived for several years."--BOOK JACKET.

An interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and science of fifteenth-century Florence. In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining their engagement with scientific, philosophical, and theological practices. By studying hundreds of fifteenth-century documents that engage with hair, Lugli foregrounds hair’s association to death and gathers insights about human life at a time when Renaissance thinkers redefined what it meant to be human and to be alive. Lugli uncovers overlooked perceptions of hair when it came to be identified as a potential vector for liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees hair as a trivial subject, relegated to passing fashion or the decorative. He shows hair, instead, to be at the heart of Florentine culture, whose inherent violence Lugli reveals by prompting questions about the entanglement of politics and desire.