Italy is a country of free political institutions, yet it has become a nation of servile courtesans, with Silvio Berlusconi as their prince. This is the controversial argument that Italian political ...philosopher and noted Machiavelli biographer Maurizio Viroli puts forward in The Liberty of Servants. Drawing upon the classical republican conception of liberty, Viroli shows that a people can be unfree even though they are not oppressed. This condition of unfreedom arises as a consequence of being subject to the arbitrary or enormous power of men like Berlusconi, who presides over Italy with his control of government and the media, immense wealth, and infamous lack of self-restraint.
The book deals with both a reconstruction of Tuscan family books' evolution and persistency, and several aspects of social history: reading and private libraries, domestic devotion, the memory of ...historical events. Starting with the Renaissance, the investigation broadens to the 17th-18th centuries and other forms of memory: private diaries and autobiographies. A final section is dedicated to the issue of memory in the egodocuments of early modern Europe.
This book traces the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Italy, the area in which humanism began in the mid thirteenth century, a century or more before exerting its influence on the rest of Europe. ...Covering a period of over four and a half centuries, this study offers the first integrated analysis of Latin writings produced in the area, examining not only religious, literary, and legal texts. Ronald G. Witt characterizes the changes reflected in these Latin writings as products of the interaction of thought with economic, political, and religious tendencies in Italian society as well as with intellectual influences coming from abroad. His research ultimately traces the early emergence of humanism in northern Italy in the mid thirteenth century to the precocious development of a lay intelligentsia in the region, whose participation in the culture of Latin writing fostered the beginnings of the intellectual movement which would eventually revolutionize all of Europe.
The establishment of permanent embassies in fifteenth-century Italy has traditionally been regarded as the moment of transition between medieval and modern diplomacy. InThe Refugee-Diplomat, Diego ...Pirillo offers an alternative history of early modern diplomacy, centered not on states and their official representatives but around the figure of "the refugee-diplomat" and, more specifically, Italian religious dissidents who forged ties with English and northern European Protestants in the hope of inspiring an Italian Reformation.
Pirillo reconsiders how diplomacy worked, not only within but also outside of formal state channels, through underground networks of individuals who were able to move across confessional and linguistic borders, often adapting their own identities to the changing political conditions they encountered. Through a trove of diplomatic and mercantile letters, inquisitorial records, literary texts, marginalia, and visual material,The Refugee-Diplomatrecovers the agency of religious refugees in international affairs, revealing their profound impact on the emergence of early modern diplomatic culture and practice.
Dana E. Katz examines the Jewish ghetto of Venice as a paradox of urban space. In 1516, the Senate established the ghetto on the periphery of the city and legislated nocturnal curfews to reduce the ...Jews' visibility in Venice. Katz argues that it was precisely this practice of marginalization that put the ghetto on display for Christian and Jewish eyes. According to her research, early modern Venetians grounded their conceptions of the ghetto in discourses of sight. Katz's unique approach demonstrates how Venice's Jewish ghetto engaged the sensory imagination of its inhabitants in complex and contradictory ways that both shaped urban space and reshaped Christian-Jewish relations.
Orpheus in the Marketplace Carter, Tim; Goldthwaite, Richard A
2013, 2013., 2013-11-04, Letnik:
10
eBook
This record of Florentine musician Jacopo Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and ...early seventeenth centuries, and opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism.
Communities and Crisis Kelly Wray, S
The Medieval Mediterranean,
2009, Letnik:
83
eBook, Book
Based on testaments and notarial contracts, this examination of the Black Death of 1348 argues for social resilience in Bologna. The notarial record demonstrates that notaries, officials, medical ...practitioners, and clergy served the populace, while families remained intact and the populace resisted flight.
In The Accademia Pontaniana: A Model of a Humanist Network Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi explores the intellectual networks which developed around the fifteenth century humanist Pontano. She applies ...recent sociological theory to investigate links between the various Italian humanist circles.
Is Italyil bel paese-the beautiful country-where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity's greed and nature's ...cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator's vision of Italy. The fifteen essays inNature and History in Modern Italyinvestigate that nation's long experience in managing domesticated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparable. The interplay of Italy's rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.
