Naples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed to maintain a distinct social character while under Spanish rule. John A. Marino's study explores how the population of the city of Naples ...constructed their identity in the face of Spanish domination.
As Western Europe’s largest city, early modern Naples was a world unto itself. Its politics were decentralized and its neighborhoods diverse. Clergy, nobles, and commoners struggled to assert political and cultural power. Looking at these three groups, Marino unravels their complex interplay to show how such civic rituals as parades and festival days fostered a unified Neapolitan identity through the assimilation of Aragonese customs, Burgundian models, and Spanish governance. He discusses why the relationship between mythical and religious representations in ritual practices allowed Naples's inhabitants to identify themselves as citizens of an illustrious and powerful sovereignty and explains how this semblance of stability and harmony hid the city's political, cultural, and social fissures. In the process, Marino finds that being and becoming Neapolitan meant manipulating the city's rituals until their original content and meaning were lost. The consequent widening of divisions between rich and poor led Naples's vying castes to turn on one another as the Spanish monarchy weakened.
Rich in source material and tightly integrated, this nuanced, synthetic overview of the disciplining of ritual life in early modern Naples digs deep into the construction of Neapolitan identity. Scholars of early modern Italy and of Italian and European history in general will find much to ponder in Marino's keen insights and compelling arguments.
Love, self-deceit, and money Stapelbroek, Koen
Love, self-deceit, and money,
c2008, 20080405, 2008, 2008-01-01, 2008-04-05, 20080101
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"Love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind." Thus, the sixteen year old Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787) presented his project to understand the sociable nature of man. This observation, a ...reflection of his own position on the relation between trade and virtue, hinted at what the mature works of Galiani, one of the most noteworthy economists and wits in eighteenth-century Italy, would eventually yield.
InLove, Self-Deceit, and Money, Koen Stapelbroek reconstructs the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment debate on the morality of market societies, a debate that hinged on the preservation of Naples' independent statehood in a global arena of commercial and military competition. Galiani rejected the moralizing and mercantile ideas of his contemporaries regarding the dangers threatening Naples, and, in hisDella moneta(1751), he justified the systems set in place by the Neapolitan government. With reference to early, previously unstudied lectures on self-deceptive 'Platonic love,' Koen Stapelbroek examines Galiani's role in the wider debate, arguing that his early moral philosophical and historical work suggests a great deal about his political-economic stance, including his assertion that money is the ultimate ordering principle in the universe.
As a study of one of the most idiosyncratic minds of the Enlightenment period,Love, Self-Deceit, and Moneyshows how diverse ideas of the development of individual passions into social dispositions, commerce, and reform politics dovetailed seamlessly in the intellectual climate of eighteenth-century Europe.
Tuff city Dines, Nick
2012., 20120115, 2012, 2012-03-19, Letnik:
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During the 1990s, Naples' left-wing administration sought to tackle the city's infamous reputation of being poor, crime-ridden, chaotic and dirty by reclaiming the city's cultural and architectural ...heritage. This book examines the conflicts surrounding the reimaging and reordering of the city's historic centre through detailed case studies of two piazzas and a centro sociale, focusing on a series of issues that include decorum, security, pedestrianization, tourism, immigration and new forms of urban protest. This monograph is the first in-depth study of the complex transformations of one of Europe's most fascinating and misunderstood cities. It represents a new critical approach to the questions of public space, citizenship and urban regeneration as well as a broader methodological critique of how we write about contemporary cities.
This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro’s miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power ...of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.
In 1343 a seventeen-year-old girl named Johanna (1326-1382) ascended the Neapolitan throne, becoming the ruling monarch of one of medieval Europe's most important polities. For nearly forty years, ...she held her throne and the avid attention of her contemporaries. Their varied responses to her reign created a reputation that made Johanna the most notorious woman in Europe during her lifetime. InFrom She-Wolf to Martyr, Elizabeth Casteen examines Johanna's evolving, problematic reputation and uses it as a lens through which to analyze often-contradictory late-medieval conceptions of rulership, authority, and femininity.
When Johanna inherited the Neapolitan throne from her grandfather, many questioned both her right to and her suitability for her throne. After the murder of her first husband, Johanna quickly became infamous as a she-wolf-a violent, predatory, sexually licentious woman. Yet, she also eventually gained fame as a wise, pious, and able queen. Contemporaries-including Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena-were fascinated by Johanna. Drawing on a wide range of textual and visual sources, Casteen reconstructs the fourteenth-century conversation about Johanna and tracks the role she played in her time's cultural imaginary. She argues that despite Johanna's modern reputation for indolence and incompetence, she crafted a new model of female sovereignty that many of her contemporaries accepted and even lauded.
The new essays in this volume aim to introduce early modern Naples - the largest city in the Spanish global empire and one of Europe's largest cities - to readers unfamiliar with its history.
Naples was a major center of the Italian Renaissance and capital of the most important state in the Italian balance of power. Under the late Angevins, the Aragonese, and then the Spanish the city ...grew ever more important as a focus of political and military power, as an exemplar of early modern urbanism, and as a driver of intellectual and cultural life rivaling Florence, Rome, and Venice. It both attracted and nurtured generations of writers, theorists, painters, sculptors, architects and urban planners, whose legacy still graces this city and makes it a major modern attraction. Charlotte Nichols and James H. Mc Gregor offer the first comprehensive English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval to the early modern period. This book presents 169 readings in English translation drawn from historical, biographical, financial, literary, artistic, religious and cultural documents starting with the later Angevin dynasty and ending at the 17th century. The Introduction provides an up-to-date survey of the period covered with discussions of the historiography and interpretive issues around each major topic, including the humanists, urbanism, architecture, the visual arts, and literary life. This volume presents new English translations of several works. Among these are Giovanni Pontano’s The Prince, On Magnificence, and selections from On Splendor; Pietro Summonte’s letter to Marcantonio Michiel surveying the condition of the arts and culture in Renaissance Naples; and Loise de Rosa’s Praise of Naples. This book also offers extensive selections from a wide variety of authors ranging from Valla, Facio, Panormita, Sannazaro, and Masuccio Salernitano to Notar Giacomo, Ferraiolo, Tansillo, Tasso, Vasari, and important women writers like Vittoria Colonna, Isabella de Morra, and Laura Bacio Terracina. 558 pages, 169 readings, preface, introduction, notes and bibliography, appendices, including the Tavola Strozzi with key, Map of Renaissance Naples with thumbnail key, index. 86 black-and-white figures, plus 48 thumbnail views. Links to online resources from A Documentary History of Naples, including image galleries with 417 additional images in full color. History, art history, literary history, cultural history, urban studies.
This is a translation and new edition of Masaniello. La sua vita e il mito in Europa (Rome, 2007), the first historical biography of the leader of the revolt that broke out in Naples in 1647–48. ...Initially, its main objectives were the cancellation of the many taxes introduced in previous decades and a political reform that would allow the people to have their voice in the civic parliament. Thanks to Masaniello, the Neapolitans were able to compel the Spanish viceroy to sign new ‘capitoli’ (popular desiderata) but soon after, Masaniello was isolated by his main counselor, Giulio Genoino, and others, and ultimately abandoned to a tragic fate. From the moment of his death, a fascinating new life began in which Masaniello was exalted and condemned in many texts (historical volumes, plays, and even a dialogue with Wilhelm Tell) until, by the Risorgimento, he was remembered as an Italian hero.
