Cultural Representations in Italy:
Tuscan Cities, 1250-1500
Ital 138ax
Edward D. English
Fall 2004
Schedule, Topics, and
Full Bibliographies
They will be regularly updated throughout the course.
Abbreviations
Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence = Gene A. Brucker, ed. The Society of
Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Brucker, Renaissance Florence = Gene A. Brucker. Renaissance Florence. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1969, rpt. 1983.
The Earthly Republic = Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, eds. The Earthly Republic:
Italian Humanists on Government and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1978.
Martines, Italian Renaissance Sextet = Lauro Martines and Murtha Baca, eds. An Italian
Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context. New York: Marsilio, 1994.
Schedule
1. September 23 Introduction
2. September 28 Tuscany and the Medieval
Communes: Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo,
and Their Countryside
Reading:
Martines, “The Ascent of the Communes,” “The Early Commune and Its
Nobility,” “The Commune around 1200,” “Populo and Popular
Commune,” and “The End of the Popular Commune” in Power
and Imagination, pp. 7-71.
Supplementary Reading
Philip Abrams, “Towns and Economic Growth: Some Theories” in Towns in Societies: Essays
in Economic History and Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978, pp. 9-35.
2
Marvin B. Becker. Florence in Transition. 2 vols. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1967-68.
Charles T. Davis. Dante’s Italy and Other Essays. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1984.
Trevor Dean, ed., The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000.
Philip Jones. The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria. Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1997.
Ian Morris, “The Early Polis as City and State” in City and Country in the Ancient World. Eds.
John Rich and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 25-57.
Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub and Julia Emlen, eds. “Editors’ Preface,” in City-States in
Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1991, pp. 9-17 and Wilfred Nippel, “Introductory Remarks: Max Weber’s The City
Revisited,” pp. 19-30.
Oswyn Murray, “Cities of Reason” in The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander. Eds. Oswyn
Murray and Simon Price. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 1-25.
Daniel Waley.The Italian City-Republics. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1988.
3. September 30 The Family, Households,
and Childhood
Readings:
Reader no. XXIII. Gene Brucker, ed., “The Family” in
The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study
Reader XI. Richard P. Saller and David I. Kertzer, “Historical
and Anthropological Perspectives on Italian Family Life”
Reader IX. Alessandra Macinghi negli Strozzi, “Letters”
Reader VI. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Cruel Mother: Maternity,
Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Centuries”.
Supplementary Reading
Leon Battista Alberti. The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book Three. Transl. Renée Neu
Watkins. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1994.
Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, “Friar and Priest” in Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp. 71-92.
Francesco Barabaro, “On Wifely Duties” in The Earthly Republic, pp. 179-228.
Giovanni Boccaccio. The Corbaccio. Transl. and ed. Anthony K. Cassell. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1975; note also the appendix on sumptuary statutes, pp. 153-64;
see also the excerpts in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of
Medieval Texts. Ed. Alcuin Blamires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 16676.
3
Giovanni Boccaccio. The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta. Ed. and transl. Mariangela CausaSteindler and Thomas Mauch. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Brucker, “The Patriciate” in Renaissance Florence, pp. 89-127; Society of Renaissance
Florence, pp. 28-42.
Gene A. Brucker. Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Ann Crabb. The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Richard A. Goldthwaite. Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968;The Building of Renaissance Florence: An
Economic and Social History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Jack Goody. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
James S. Grubb. Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the
Veneto. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Louis Haas. The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in
Florence, 1300-1600. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
David Herlihy. Medieval Households. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985;.
David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the
Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Diane Owen Hughes, “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,” Journal of Family
History, 3:3 (Fall, 1978), 262-96.
Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in
European History. Eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1977, pp. 136-64. There is a second edition in 1987.
Francis William Kent. Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the
Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Julius Kirshner. Pursuing Honor While Avoiding Sin: The Monte delle Doti of Florence. Milan:
A. Giuffrè, 1978.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Thomas Kuehn. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance
Italy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Thomas Kuehn, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 2002.
4
Charles de La Ronciére, “Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance” in A History of
Private Life, II: Revelations of the Medieval World. Eds. Philip Ariès and Georges
Duby. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 157-309.
Anthony Molho. Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1994.
Childhood
Clarissa W. Atkinson. The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991.
Peter B. A. Biller, “Childhood in the Middle Ages,” History Today, 36 (August, 1986), 42-49.
John Boswell. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe
from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Stanley Chojnacki, “Measuring Adulthood: Adolescence and Gender in Renaissance Venice,’
Journal of Family History, 17:4 (1992), 371-95.
Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “A Flower of Evil: Young Men in Medieval Italy” in A History of
Young People in the West, Volume One: Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage. Eds.
Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 173-221, 350-62.
Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood” in The History of Childhood. Ed. Lloyd
deMause. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974, pp. 1-73; “The Universality of
Incest,” The Journal of Psychohistory, 19:2 (Fall, 1991), 123-64.
Giovanni Dominici. On the Education of Children (Regola del governo di cura familiare).
Transl. Arthur Basil Coté. Washington: The Catholic University of America, 1927.
Philip Gavitt, “Introduction” in Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale
degli Innocenti, 1410-1536. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp.
1-32; “Infant Death in Late Medieval Florence: The Smothering Hypothesis
Reconsidered” in Medieval Family Roles: A Book of Essays. New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1996, pp. 137-53.
Paul F. Gehl. A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
Paul Grendler. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Louis Haas, “Women and Childbearing in Medieval Florence” in Medieval Family Roles: A
Book of Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996, pp. 87-99.
David Herlihy, “Medieval Children” in Essays on Medieval Civilization. Eds. Bede Lackner and
Kenneth Roy Philip. The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1978, pp. 109-141.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Childhood in Tuscany at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century”
and “Blood Parents and Milk Parents: Wet Nursing in Florence, 1300-1530” in
5
Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1985.
James Bruce Ross, “The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth
Century” in The History of Childhood. Ed. Lloyd deMause. New York: The
Psychohistory Press, 1974, pp. 183-228.
Richard C. Trexler. Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence. Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 111. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, 1994; “The Foundlings of Florence, 1395-1455,” History of
Childhood Quarterly, 1:2 (Fall, 1973), 259-84.
4. October 5 Sexuality and Gender
Readings:
Reader no. II. Bernardino of Siena, “On the Vanity of the
World and Especially of Women”
Reader no. V. Nicholas Davidson, “Theology, Nature and the Law:
Sexual Sin and Sexual Crime in Italy from the Fourteenth
to the Seventeenth Century”
Reader no. X. James M. Saslow, “Homosexuality in the Renaissance:
Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression”
Reader VII. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Griselda Complex:
Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento”.
Supplementary Reading
John W. Baldwin. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
John Boswell. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western
Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1980; Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. New
York: Villiard, 1994.
James A. Brundage. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Joan Cadden. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and
Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Gregorio Dati, “The Diary of Gregorio Dati” in Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The
Diaries of Bonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati. Ed. Gene A. Brucker. New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1967, pp. 107-141.
Arnold I. Davidson, “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry, 14:1 (Autumn,
1987), 16-48.
Dyan Elliott. Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
6
Joan M. Ferrante. The Conflict of Love and Honor: The Medieval Tristan Legend in France,
Germany and Italy. The Hague: Mouton, 1973; Woman as Image in Medieval
Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction; Volume 2: The Use of
Pleasure; Volume 3: The Care of the Self. New York: Random House, 1978-86
[1978-84].
Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, “Ricciarda” in Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp. 19-35.
Monica H. Green, “Female Sexuality in the Medieval West,” Trends in History: A Review of
Periodical Literature in History, 4 (1990), 127-58.
Heather Gregory, transl. Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.
David M. Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality?,” History and Theory, 28:3 (1989), 25774.
Margaret L. King. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1991.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed. A History of Women, II: Silences of the Middle Ages.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1992 [1990].
Thomas Kuehn. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance
Italy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Clare A. Lees, ed. Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Medieval
Cultures, 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Marilyn Miguiel and Juliana Schiesari, eds. Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and
the Italian Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
John T. Noonan, Jr. Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and
Canonists. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1966.
Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines, eds., “VIII. The Later Middle Ages” and “IX. The
Renaissance and the Reformation,” in Not in God’s Image: Women in History from
the Greeks to the Victorians. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1973, pp.
127-78, 179-217.
Robert A. Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” Radical
History Review, 20 (Spring-Summer, 1979), 3-23.
Pierre J. Payer. The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Antonia Pulci. Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays. Transl.
James Wyatt Cook. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
7
John M. Riddle. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Michael Rocke. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance
Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality” in Sexuality and
Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Ed. James Grantham
Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1993, pp. 10-30.
James M. Saslow. Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Leo S. Steinberg. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. 2nd Ed.,
Revised and Expanded. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
5. October 7 Reading and Reflection
– No Class
6. October 12 Demography, Death
and Plague
Readings:
Reader XIV. Alberto Tenenti, “Death in History: The Function
and Meaning of Death in Florentine Historiography of the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”
Reader XII. Peter P. A. Biller, “Birth-Control in the West in the
Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,”
Past and Present, 94 (February, 1982), 3-26.
Supplementary Reading
John Aberth. From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and
Death in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Philippe Ariès. The Hour of Our Death. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; Images of Man and
Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
James R. Banker. Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian
Commune in the Late Middle Ages. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1988.
T. S. R. Boase. Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment and Remembrance. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
Ann G. Carmichael. Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Death and Property in Siena, 1205-1800: Strategies for the Afterlife.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; The Cult of Remembrance and
the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992; The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture
in Early Renaissance Europe. London: Arnold, 2002.
8
Creighton Gilbert, ‘When Did a Renaissance Man Grow Old?,” Studies in the Renaissance, 14
(1967), 7-32.
David Herlihy, “Growing Old in the Quattrocento” in Old Age in Preindustrial Society. Ed.
Peter N. Stearns. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982, pp. 104-118; The Black Death
and the Transformation of the West. Ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997.
David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the
Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Rosemary Horrox, ed. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
Margaret L. King. Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
Thomas Kuehn, “Law, Death, and Heirs in the Renaissance: Repudiation of Inheritance in
Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly, 45:3 (Autumn, 1992), 484-516.
Jacques Le Goff. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Transl. Arthur Goldhammer.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980; Your Money or Your Life: Economy
and Religion in the Middle Ages. Transl. Patricia Ranum. New York: Zone Books,
1988 [1986].
Sharon T. Strocchia. Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Marcel Tetel, Ronald B. Witt and Rona Goffen, eds. Life and Death in Fifteenth Century
Florence. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.
7. October 14 Civic Humanism
Readings:
Reader VIII. Brunetto Latini, “The Book of the Treasure (an Excerpt)”
Martines, Power and Imagination, especially “The Course of Urban
Values,” pp. 72-93 and “Humanism: A Program for Ruling
Classes,” pp. 191-217
Gentile Sermini, “Scopone” in Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp. 39-68.
Supplementary Reading
Leon Battista Alberti. The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book Three. Transl. Renée Neu
Watkins. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1994.
Hans Baron. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance Civic Humanism and Republican
Liberty in a Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1955.
Hans Baron. In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism. Essays on the Transition from
Medieval to Modern Thought. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Brucker, “The Renaissance City” in Renaissance Florence, pp. 1-50.
9
Leonardo Bruni. History of the Florentine People, Volume I, Books I-IV. Transl. James
Hankins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Giorgio Chittolini, “Civic Religion and the Countryside in Late Medieval Italy” in City and
Countryside in Late and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones. Eds.
Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham. London: The Hambledon Press, 1990, pp. 69-80.
Dante, Inferno, 12, 15 (for Latini).
Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins and David Thompson, eds. The Humanism of Leonardo
Bruni: Selected Texts. Binghamton: The Renaissance Society of America, 1987.
Machiavelli. The Prince and The Discourses.
Coluccio Salutati, ‘Letters...’ in The Earthly Republic, pp. 81-118.
Jerrold E. Seigel, “Civic Humanism or Ciceronian Rhetoric?” Past and Present, 34 (1966), 348, but see Hans Baron’s reply “Leonardo Bruni: `Professional Rhetorician’ or `Civic
Humanist’”?, Past and Present, 36 (April 1967), 21-37; Rhetoric and Philosophy in
Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Gentile Sermini, “Scopone” in Italian Renaissance Sextet, pp. 39-68.
Quentin Skinner. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One: The
Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Renée Neu Watkins, ed. Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth
Century Florence. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press,
1978.
Ronald G. Witt. In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to
Bruni. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2000.
8. October 19 Florence and the
City-States of Tuscany
Readings:
Martines, “The Course of Political Feeling” and “Oligarchy: Renaissance
Republics” in Power and Imagination, pp. 111-29, 130-61
Baldassarri, Images, “Part One: Origins,” pp. 3-36.
Supplementary Reading
Gene A. Brucker. Florentine Politics and Society, 1343-1378. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1962; The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977.
William M. Bowsky. A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena under the Nine, 1287-1355.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
10
Giorgio Chittolini, “The Italian City-State and Its Territory” in City-States in Classical
Antiquity and Medieval Italy. Eds. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub and Julia Emlen.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 589-602.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348-1434.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
William J. Connell and Andrea Zorzi, eds. Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of
Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Jacques Heers. Parties and Political Life in the Medieval West. Transl. David Nicholas. Europe
in the Middle Ages, 7. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1977.
David Herlihy. Pisa in the Early Renaissance. A Study of Urban Growth. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1958; Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia.The Social History of an
Italian Town, 1200-1430. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
Dale Kent. The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426-1434. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978.
Carol Lansing. The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Michael Levey. Florence: A Portrait. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Lauro Martines, ed. Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200-1500. Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1972.
Christine Meek. Lucca, 1369-1400: Politics and Society in an Early Renaissance City-State.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
John M. Najemy. Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Nicolai Rubinstein. The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494). Oxford:
The Clarendon Press, 1966.
Guido Ruggiero. Violence in Early Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1980.
Laura Ikins Stern. The Criminal Law System of Medieval and Renaissance Florence.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
9. October 21 The Medici (Cosimo)
Readings:
Reader no. XXI. Francesco Petrarca, “How a Ruler Ought to Govern
His State”
Martines, “Despotism: Signories” and “The Princely Courts” in
Power and Imagination, pp. 94-110, 218-40
Baldassarri, Images, “Part Two: History and Society (First Section),”
pp. 39-86.
Supplementary Reading
11
Dale Kent. The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426-1434. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978.
Dale Kent. Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000.
10. October 26 The Medici (Lorenzo)
– First Paper Due!
Readings:
Martines, “Invasion: City States in Lightning and Twilight,” “The High
Renaissance: A Divided Consciousness,” and “The End of the
Renaissance,” in Power and Imagination, pp. 277-337
Baldassarri, Images, “Part Two: History and Society (Second Part),”
pp. 88-122
Reader XX. Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Giacoppo [= “Giacoppo” in An Italian
Renaissance Sextet] transl. in Renaissance Comic Tales of
Love, Treachery, and Revenge. Eds. Valerie Martone and
Robert L. Martone.
Supplementary Reading
Brucker, Society of Renaissance Florence, pp. 95-138.
F. W. Kent. Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Univeristy press, 2004.
Cristina Acidini Luchinat. Renaissance Florence: The Age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1449-1492.
Milan: Charta, 1993.
Lauro Martines. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
Angelo Poliziano, “The Pazzi Conspiracy” in The Earthly Republic, pp. 293-322.
11. October 28 Patronage, Artists,
and Writers
Readings:
Martines, “The Course of Urban Values” and “Art: An Alliance
with Power” in Power and Imagination, pp. 72-93, 241-76
Baldassarri, Images, “Part Three: Literature” and “Part Four:
Art,” pp. 125-81, and 185-226”.
Supplementary Reading
Frederick Antal. Florentine Painting and Its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic
before Cosimo de’Medici’s Advent to Power: XIV and Early XV Centuries. New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948.
Michael Baxandall. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social
History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; “The Language of
Art History,” New Literary History, 10 (1979), 453-65.
12
Judith C. Brown, “Prosperity or Hard Times in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly,
42:4 (Winter, 1989), 761-80.
Patricia Fortini Brown. Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988.
Brucker, “Culture” in Renaissance Florence, pp. 213-55.
D. S. Chambers, ed. Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance. London: Macmillan,
1970.
Alison Cole. Virtue and Magnificence: Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts. New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1995.
Bruce Cole. The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian. London: John Murray,
1983.
John V. Fleming. From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982.
Kurt W. Foster, “Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?,” New Literary History,
3 (1972), 459-70.
Francis William Kent with Patricia Simons, “Renaissance Patronage: An Introductory Essay”
in Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987, pp. 1-21.
Creighton E. Gilbert. Italian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980.
Richard A. Goldthwaite. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social
History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Wealth and Demand
for Art in Italy, 1300-1600. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993;
ed., “Recent Trends in Renaissance Studies: Economic History,” Renaissance
Quarterly, 42:4 (Winter, 1989), 760-825.
E. H. Gombrich, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art” in Italian Renaissance Studies. Ed. E. F.
Jacob. London: Faber and Faber, 1960, pp. 279-311; “The Social History of Art” in
Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London:
Phaidon, 1963, pp. 86-94.
Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach” in
Patronage in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 2-23.
Edwin Hall. The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double
Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Rab Hatfield. Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration”: A Study in Pictorial Content. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976.
Mary Hollingsworth. Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth
Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
13
William Hood, “The State of Research in Italian Renaissance Art,” The Art Bulletin, 69
(1987), 174-86.
Bram Kempers. Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in
Renaissance Italy. Transl. Beverley Jackson. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press,
1992 [1987].
Francis William Kent and Patricia Simons, eds. Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance
Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, especially “Renaissance Patronage: An
Introductory Essay’, pp. 1-21.
John Larner, “The Artist and the Intellectuals in Fourteenth-Century,” History, 54 (1969),
13-30.
Robert S. Lopez, “Hard Times and Investment in Culture” in The Renaissance: Six Essays.
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953, pp. 29-54; and Harry A. Miskimin,
“The Economic Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review, 14:3
(April, 1962), 408-426.
Lauro Martines. Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Millard Meiss. Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and
Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951.
Charles M. Rosenberg, ed. Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy,
1250-1500. Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, 2. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Nicolai Rubinstein. The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and
Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic. Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1995.
Linda Seidel. Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Anabel Thomas. The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Marvin Trachtenberg. Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, Power in Early Modern Florence.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Martin Wackernagel. The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons,
Workshop and Art Market. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981 [1938].
Evelyn Welch. Art and Society in Italy, 1350-1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
12. November 2 The Good Government
Frescos in Siena
Readings:
Reader no. XV. Randolph Starn, “The Republican Regime of
14
the Room of Peace in Siena, 1338-40,” Representations,
18 (Spring) 1-33.
Supplementary Reading
Chiara Frugoni. A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World. Transl.
William McCuaig. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1983].
Nikolai Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and
Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald
Institutes, 22 (1958) 179-207.
Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings of
the British Academy, 72 (1986) 1-56.
Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 13001600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
13. November 9 Civic Religion, Penance,
and Comportment
Readings:
Antonio Manetti, “The Fat Carpenter” in Italian Renaissance Sextet,
pp. 171-241; or Reader XIX. “Fatso the Carpenter (Antonio
Manetti)” in An Italian Renaissance Sextet] in Italian
Renaissance Tales. Ed. Janet Levarie Smarr
Reader XVII. Diana Webb, “Introduction” and “Conclusion” in
Patrons and Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City-States
Reader XVI. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Fast, Feast, and Flesh:
The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women”
Reader XIII. Timothy Verdon, “Christianity, the Renaissance, and
the Study of History: Environments of Experience
and Imagination”
Baldassarri, Images, “Part Five: Religion,” pp. 229-83.
Supplementary Reading
Hans Baron. In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism. Essays on the Transition from
Medieval to Modern Thought. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Rudolph M. Bell. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Daniel Bornstein. The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds. Women and Religion in Medieval and
Renaissance Italy. Transl. Margery J. Schneider. Chicago:The University of Chicago
Press, 1996 [1992].
Robert Brentano. Rome before Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth-Century Rome. New
York: Basic Books, 1974.
15
Caroline Walker Bynum. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Jean Delumeau. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th-18th
Centuries. Transl. Eric Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990 [1983].
Michael Goodich. Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public
Salvation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Richard Kieckhefer. Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Friedrich Ohly. The Damned and the Elect: Guilt in Western Culture. Transl. Linda Archibald.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1976].
Thomas N. Tentler. Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation. Princeton, 1977;
“The Summa for Confessors as an Instrument of Social Control” in The Pursuit of
Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion. Eds. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko
Obermann. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974.
André Vauchez. The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices. Ed.
Daniel Bornstein. Transl. Margery J. Schneider. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1993.
André Vauchez. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Transl. Jean Birrell. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1988].
Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western
Christendom, 1000-1700. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Ronald F. E. Weissman. Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic
Press, 1982.
14. November 11 Veterans Day (WWI Armistice
Day) – No Class
15. November 16 Economics and Attitudes
toward Wealth
Readings:
Reader no. I. Bernardino of Siena, “On Usury”
Reader no. III. “Commerce Confronts the Usury Problem”
Martines, “Economic Trends and Attitudes” in Power and Imagination,
pp. 162-90; review his “The Course of Urban Values,”
pp. 72-93.
Supplementary Reading
John W. Baldwin. The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and
Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Transactions of the American
Philosophical Association, NS 49:4. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society,
16
1959; Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His
Circle. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Hans Baron. In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism. Essays on the Transition from
Medieval to Modern Thought. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Poggio Bracciolini, “On Avarice” in The Earthly Republic, pp. 231-89.
Vittore Branca, transl. Merchant Writers of the Italian Renaissance. Transl. Murtha Baca.
New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1999 [1986].
Brucker, “The Economy” in Renaissance Florence, pp. 51-88.
Dante, Paradiso, 15.
Raymond de Roover. Business, Banking and Economic Thought. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1974; “The Commercial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century” in
Enterprise and Secular Change. Readings in Economic History. Edited by Frederic C.
Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma. Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1953, pp. 80-85; “The
Organization of Trade” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. III:
Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages. Edited by M. M. Postan, E. E.
Rich and Edward Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965, pp. 42-118.
John E. Dotson, transl. Merchant Culture in Fourteenth Century Venice: The Zibaldone da
Canal. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 98. Binghamton: Center for
Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994.
Amintore Fanfani. Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism. Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984 [1935].
Philip Gavitt, “Introduction” in Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale
degli Innocenti, 1410-1536. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp.
1-32.
John Gilchrist. The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages. London: Macmillan,
1969.
John Henderson. Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence. Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1994; “The Parish and the Poor in Florence at the Time of the Black Death: The Case
of S. Frediano,” Continuity and Change, 3:2 (August, 1988), 247-72.
Bede Jarrett. Social Theories of the Middle Ages. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1926.
Jacques Le Goff. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Transl. Arthur Goldhammer.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980; Your Money or Your Life: Economy
and Religion in the Middle Ages. Transl. Patricia Ranum. New York: Zone Books,
1988.
Frederic C. Lane. Andrea Barbarigo: Merchant of Venice, 1418-1449. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1944; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1967.
Odd Langholm. Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic
Sources. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1979; Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian
17
Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget,
1983; Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and
Usury according to the Parisian Theological Tradition, 1200-1350. Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1992;“Economic Freedom In Scholastic Thought,” History of Political Economy, 14
(1982), 260-83.
Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds. Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence,
Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
David Little. Religion, Order and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Lester K. Little. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1978.
Robert S. Lopez. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971; “The Trade of Medieval Europe: The South”in
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. II: Trade and Industry in the Middle
Ages. 2nd ed. Edited by M. M. Postan and Edward Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987, pp. 306-379.
John F. McGovern, “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes -- Economic Humanism, Economic
Nationalism -- During the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, A.D. 1220-1550,”
Traditio, 26 (1970), 217-53.
T. P. McLaughlin, “The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury,” Mediaeval Studies, 1 (1939),
81-147, 2 (1940), 1-22.
Anthony Molho, ed. Social and Economic Foundations of the Italian Renaissance. New York:
Wiley, 1969.
Michel Mollat. The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986.
Benjamin Nelson. The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. 2nd
Ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.
John T. Noonan, Jr. The Scholastic Analysis of Usury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1957.
Iris Origo. The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1963 [1957].
Brian Pullan, “Support and Redeem: Charity and Poor Relief in Italian Cities from the
Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century,” Continuity and Change, 3:2 (August,
1988), 177-208.
Joseph A. Schumpeter. The History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1954.
Joseph J. Spengler. Origins of Economic Thought and Justice. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1980.
18
Richard C. Trexler. Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence. Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 111. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, 1994; “The Foundlings of Florence, 1395-1455,” History of
Childhood Quarterly, 1:2 (Fall, 1973), 259-84; “Charity and the Defence of Urban
Elites in the Italian Communes” in The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful: Elites
and Upper Classes in History. Ed. Frederic Cople Jaher. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1973, pp. 64-109.
Ernst Troeltsch. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Vol. I. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Transl. Talcott Parson. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958 [1904-20].
16. November 18 Music and Society
– Second Paper Due!
Readings:
To be supplied
Study Questions: To be supplied.
17. November 23 Outsiders and Travelers through
the Twentieth Century
Reading:
Baldassarri, Images, “Part Six. Florence through Foreigners’
Eyes,” pp. 287-324.
Supplementary Reading
Edward Cheney. Ed. A Traveller’s Companion to Florence. New York: Interlink Books, 2002.
R. W. B. Lewis. The City of Florence: Historical Vistas and Personal Sightings. New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1995.
18. November 25 Thanksgiving Day – No Class
19. November 30 Review and Discussion of Longer
Papers and Final Examination
20. December 2 Review and Distribution of Take-Home
Final Examination – Third or Single
Paper Due!!
The Final Examination will be due back on December 10!
Exact details of where to return it and by what time will be
supplied.