In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century, a crucial transitional period before the city's rebirth. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital. Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital. Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

Time in the Eternal City is a major contribution to the study of time and its numerous aspects in late medieval and Renaissance Rome.

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.

In Rome the echoes of the past resound clearly in its palaces and monuments, and in the remains of the ancient imperial city. But another presence has dominated Rome for 2,000 years -the pope, whose actions and influence echo down the ages. In this epic tale, historian Jessica Wärnberg tells, for the first time, the story of Rome through the lens of its popes, illuminating how these remarkable (and unremarkable) men have transformed lives and played a crucial role in deciding the fate of the city. Emerging as the anonymous leader of a marginal cult in the humblest quarters of the city, less than 300 years later the pope sat enthroned in a gilt basilica, endorsed by the emperor himself. Eventually, the Roman pontiff would supplant even the emperors, becoming the de facto ruler of Rome and pre-eminent leader of the Christian world. Shifting elegantly between the panoramic and the personal, the spiritual and the profane, this is a fresh and often surprising take on a city, a people and an institution that is at once familiar and elusive.

This is the untold story of the men who fed, dressed, protected and advised the cardinals and great nobles of Baroque Rome. Against the background of demographic crisis and a Europe gripped by plague, war and famine, the papal capital lured ambitious gentlemen and hungry commoners to work in service. Mirroring a city where men far outnumbered women, elite households provided jobs for thousands of male immigrants from all over Italy and beyond. Footmen, secretaries, stable boys, cooks and accountants composed an all-male world that fit awkwardly within the paradigm of early modern patriarchy. A gender ideology dependent on the idea that men were innately superior to women had to navigate a society without women and justify the subordination of most men to the few. Rigid domestic hierarchies imposed by employers and implemented by gentlemen servants yielded only the barest subsistence to the robust but unskilled majority. The vagaries of the patron-client relationship doomed even the gentlemen to insecurity. In this context the streets, churches and squares of Rome offered richer, if sometimes dangerous, opportunities than the palaces to enjoy masculine privilege and the experience of egalitarian fraternity. This book mobilizes census records, trials, family account books and household manuals to show both the contradictions and the tenacity of patriarchy in a city of men.