This study provides an overview of Florentine intellectual life and community in the late Renaissance. It shows how studies of language helped Florentines to develop their own story as a people distinct from ancient Greece or Rome.

By the sixteenth century, Florence was famous across Europe for its achievements in the arts, letters, and humanist learning. Its intellectual life flourished anew at midcentury with Duke Cosimo and the Accademia Fiorentina. In this study, Ann Moyer provides an overview of Florentine intellectual life and community in the late Renaissance. She shows how studies of language helped Florentines develop their own story as a people distinct from ancient Greece or Rome, trace the rise of the city's medieval government, and explore how the city evolved into a hospitable environment for letters and the arts. Studies of Florentine art gave rise to art history, while those devoted to Florentine traditions and customs inspired broader questions about how to think about cultural change. Demonstrating how the intellectual activity around language, history, and art related and supported each other, Moyer's book documents the origins of the modern narrative of the Renaissance itself.

The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years.

The Intellectual Struggle for Florence is an analysis of the ideology that developed in Florence with the rise of the Medici, during the early fifteenth century, the period long recognized as the most formative of the early Renaissance. Instead of simply describing early Renaissance ideas, this volume attempts to relate these ideas to specific social and political conflicts of the fifteenth century, and specifically to the development of the Medici regime. It first shows how the Medici party came to be viewed as fundamentally different from their opponents, the "oligarchs," then explores the intellectual world of these oligarchs (the "traditional culture"). As political conflicts sharpened, some humanists (Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Filelfo) with close ties to oligarchy still attempted to enrich traditional culture with classical learning, while others, such as Niccolo Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini, rejected tradition outright and created a new ideology for the Medici party. What is striking is the extent to which Niccoli and Poggio were able to turn a Latin or classical culture into a "popular culture," and how the culture of the vernacular remained traditional and oligarchic.

In this book, Christopher Celenza provides an intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance during the long fifteenth century, from c.1350–1525. His book fills a bibliographic gap between Petrarch and Machiavelli and offers clear case studies of contemporary luminaries, including Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. Integrating sources in Italian and Latin, Celenza focuses on the linked issues of language and philosophy. He also examines the conditions in which Renaissance intellectuals operated in an era before the invention of printing, analyzing reading strategies and showing how texts were consulted, and how new ideas were generated as a result of conversations, both oral and epistolary. The result is a volume that offers a new view on both the history of philosophy and Italian Renaissance intellectual life. It will serve as a key resource for students and scholars of early modern Italian humanism and culture.

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.

Award-winning historian Joanne M. Ferraro's The Renaissance and the Wider World skillfully surveys the economic, political, social, and cultural history of Europe for the period between 1250 and 1600. The book examines how the Renaissance manifested itself through developments in the high culture of art, architecture, philosophy, science, technology, and education, as well as material culture in the form of worldly goods and consumption patterns. Ferraro expertly shows how Renaissance high culture began in 13th-century Italy, with important ancient and medieval legacies and cultural infusions from China, North Africa, and Islam and, from the 16th century, the Ottomans and the Americas; she also examines some of the ways in which this Renaissance then impacted the rest of Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire during the 15th and 16th centuries. Vital and innovative themes that permeate the text's discussions of science, art, architecture, philosophy, and technology are that: * Global encounters helped shape the material, intellectual and artistic cultures of the age * Both women and men contributed significantly to the advances made * The daily lives of ordinary men and women are fundamental to understanding this remarkable period Highly illustrated and with valuable pedagogical features, such as timelines and a glossary, The Renaissance and the Wider World is the essential guide to a European era of profound global importance.