Download or read book From Florence to the Mediterranean and Beyond written by Anthony Molho and published by Librarie Droz. This book was released on 2009 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Florence to the Mediterranean and Beyond written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beyond Florence written by Paula Findlen and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence—as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the “Florentine model” to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life—the “many Italies” that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field. At the volume’s core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period? In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.
Download or read book Printing a Mediterranean World written by Sean Roberts and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey. Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.
Download or read book Reading Machiavelli written by John P. McCormick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent was Machiavelli a “Machiavellian”? Was he an amoral adviser of tyranny or a stalwart partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power politics or a devout Italian patriot? A reviver of pagan virtue or initiator of modern nihilism? Reading Machiavelli answers these questions through original interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli’s three major political works—The Prince, Discourses, and Florentine Histories—and demonstrates that a radically democratic populism seeded the Florentine’s scandalous writings. John McCormick challenges the misguided understandings of Machiavelli set forth by prominent thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and representatives of the Straussian and Cambridge schools. McCormick emphasizes the fundamental, often unacknowledged elements of a vibrant Machiavellian politics: the utility of vigorous class conflict between elites and common citizens for virtuous democratic republics, the necessity of political and economic equality for genuine civic liberty, and the indispensability of religious tropes for the exercise of effective popular judgment. Interrogating the established reception of Machiavelli’s work by such readers as Rousseau, Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, and J.G.A. Pocock, McCormick exposes what was effectively an elite conspiracy to suppress the Florentine’s contentious, egalitarian politics. In recovering the too-long-concealed quality of Machiavelli’s populism, this book acts as a Machiavellian critique of Machiavelli scholarship. Advancing fresh renderings of works by Machiavelli while demonstrating how they have been misread previously, Reading Machiavelli presents a new outlook for how politics should be conceptualized and practiced.
Download or read book Everything is on the Move written by Stephan Conermann and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2014 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, we try to understand the "Mamluk Empire" not as a confined space but as a region where several nodes of different networks existed side-by-side and at the same time. In our opinion, these networks constitute to a great extent the core of the so-called Mamluk society; they form the basis of the social order. Following, in part, concepts refined in the New Area Studies, recent reflections about the phenomenon of the "Empire - State", trajectories in today's Global History, and the spatial turn in modern historiography, we intend to identify a number of physical and cognitive networks with one or more nodes in Mamluk-controlled territories. In addition to this, one of the most important analytical questions would be to define the role of these networks in Mamluk society.
Download or read book Machiavelli on War written by Christopher Lynch and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official for military matters to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli's works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war. Lynch details Machiavelli's understanding of warfare in terms of both actual armed conflict and at the intellectual level of thinkers competing on the field of knowledge and belief. Throughout Machiavelli's works, he focuses on how military commanders' knowledge of human necessities, beginning with their own, enables and requires them to mold soldiers, organizationally and politically, to best deploy them in operations attuned to political context and changing circumstances. Intellectually, leaders must shape minds, their own and others', to reject beliefs that would weaken their purpose; for Machiavelli, this meant overcoming the classical and Christian traditions in favor of a new teaching of human freedom and excellence. As Machiavelli on War makes clear, prevailing both on the battlefield and in the war of ideas demands a single-minded engagement in "reasoning about everything," beginning with oneself. For Machiavelli, Lynch shows, the successful military commander is not just an excellent leader but also an excellent human being in constant pursuit of the truth about themselves and the world.
Download or read book Authority in European Book Culture 1400 1600 written by Pollie Bromilow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its many and varied manifestations, authority has frequently played a role in the communication process in both manuscript and print. This volume explores how authority, whether religious, intellectual, political or social, has enforced the circulation of certain texts and text versions, or acted to prevent the distribution of books, pamphlets and other print matter. It also analyzes how readers, writers and printers have sometimes rebelled against the constraints and restrictions of authority, publishing controversial works anonymously or counterfeiting authoritative texts; and how the written or printed word itself has sometimes been perceived to have a kind of authority, which might have had ramifications in social, political or religious spheres. Contributors look at the experience of various European cultures-English, French, German and Italian-to allow for comparative study of a number of questions pertinent to the period. Among the issues explored are local and regional factors influencing book production; the interplay between manuscript and print culture; the slippage between authorship and authority; and the role of civic and religious authority in cultural production. Deliberately conceived to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between the history of the book, and literary and cultural history, this volume takes a pan-European perspective to explore the ways in which authority infiltrates and is in turn propagated or undermined by book culture.
Download or read book History and Economic Life written by Georg Christ and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and Economic Life offers students a wide-ranging introduction to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to interpreting economic history sources from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Having identified an ever-widening gap between the use of qualitative sources by cultural historians and quantitative sources by economic historians, the book aims to bridge the divide by making economic history sources more accessible to students and the wider public, and highlighting the need for a complementary rather than exclusive approach. Divided into two parts, the book begins by equipping students with a toolbox to approach economic history sources, considering the range of sources that might be of use and introducing different ways of approaching them. The second part consists of case studies that examine how economic historians use such sources, helping readers to gain a sense of context and understanding of how these sources can be used. The book thereby sheds light on important debates both within and beyond the field, and highlights the benefits gained when combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to source analysis. Introducing sources often avoided in culturally-minded history or statistically-minded economic history courses respectively, and advocating a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, it is an essential resource for students undertaking source analysis within the field.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300 1600 written by Wim Blockmans and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600 explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas. Maritime trade routes connected diverse geographical and cultural spheres, contributing to a more integrated Europe in both cultural and material terms. This volume explores networks’ economic functions alongside their intercultural exchanges, contacts and practical arrangements in ports on the European coasts. The collection takes as its central question how shippers and merchants were able to connect regional and interregional trade circuits around and beyond Europe in the late medieval period. It is divided into four parts, with chapters in Part I looking across broad themes such as ships and sailing routes, maritime law, financial linkages and linguistic exchanges. In the following parts - divided into the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic and North Seas - contributors present case studies addressing themes including conflict resolution, relations between different types of main ports and their hinterland, the local institutional arrangements supporting maritime trade, and the advantages and challenges of locations around the continent. The volume concludes with a summary that points to the extraterritorial character of trading systems during this fascinating period of expansion. Drawing together an international team of contributors, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe is a vital contribution to the study of maritime history and the history of trade. It is essential reading for students and scholars in these fields.
Download or read book The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy written by Lawrin David Armstrong and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy features original contributions by international scholars on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lauro Martines' Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, which is recognized as a groundbreaking study challenging traditional approaches to both Florentine and legal history. Essays by leading historians examine the professional, social, and political functions of Italian jurists from the thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. The volume also examines the use of emergency powers, the critical role played by jurists in mediating the rule of law, and the adjudication of political crimes. The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy provides both an assessment of Martines' pioneering archival scholarship as well as fresh insights into the interplay of law and politics in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Download or read book The Making of the Modern Corporation written by Carlo Taviani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of a financial institution, the modern corporation, in Genoa and reconstructs its diffusion in England, the Netherlands, and France. At its inception, the Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1805) was entrusted with managing the public debt in Genoa. Over time, it took on powers we now ascribe to banks and states, accruing financial characteristics and fiscal, political, and territorial powers. As one of the earliest central banks, it ruled territories and local populations for almost a century. It controlled strategic Genoese possessions near and far, including the island of Corsica, the city of Famagusta (in Cyprus), and trading posts in Crimea, the Black Sea, the Lunigiana in northern Tuscany, and various towns in Liguria. In the early sixteenth century, in his Florentine Histories (Book VIII, Chapter 29), Niccolò Machiavelli was the first to analyze the relationship between the Casa di San Giorgio’s financial and territorial powers, declaring its possession of territories as the basis of its ascendancy. Later, the founders of some of the earliest corporations, including the Dutch East India Company (1602), the Bank of England (1694), and John Law’s Mississippi Company (1720) in France, referenced the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.
Download or read book Mediterranean written by Predrag Matvejevic and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cataloging the sights, smells, sounds, and features common to the many peoples who share the Mediterranean, this fascinating portrait of a place and its civilizations is sure to appeal to active and armchair travelers alike. 58 illustrations.
Download or read book The Familiarity of Strangers written by Francesca Trivellato and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives--including a vast cache of merchants' letters written between 1704 and 1746--reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before. The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.
Download or read book Milan Undone written by John Gagné and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars. In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion. John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost. Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.
Download or read book Spies for the Sultan written by Emrah Safa Gürkan and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated into English for the first time, this is a fascinating history of intelligence practices and their impact on great power rivalries in the early modern era In the sixteenth century, an intense rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish Habsburg Empire and its allies spurred the creation of early modern intelligence. Translated into English for the first time, Emrah Safa Gürkan's Spies for the Sultan reconstructs this history of Ottoman espionage, sabotage, and bribery practices in the Mediterranean world. Then as now, collecting political, naval, military, and economic information was essential to staying one step ahead of your rivals. Porous and shifting borders, the ability to assume multiple identities, and variable allegiances made conditions in this era ripe for espionage around the Mediterranean. The Ottomans used networks of merchants, corsairs, soldiers, and other travelers to move among their enemies and report intelligence from points far and wide. The Ottoman sultans invested in the novel technologies of cryptography and stenography. Ottoman intelligence operatives not only collected information but also used disinformation, bribery, and sabotage to subvert their enemies. This history of early modern intelligence is based on extraordinary archival research in Turkey, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Croatia, and it provides important insights into the origins of modern intelligence.
Download or read book Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an overview of the rich narrative material circulating in the medieval Mediterranean. As a multilingual and multicultural zone, the Eastern Mediterranean offered a broad market for tales in both oral and written form and longer works of fiction, which were translated and reworked in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations of new audiences, thus becoming common intellectual property of all the peoples around the Mediterranean shores. Among others, the volume examines for the first time popular eastern tales, such as Kalila and Dimna, Sindbad, Barlaam and Joasaph, and Arabic epics together with their Byzantine adaptations. Original Byzantine love romances, both learned and vernacular, are discussed together with their Persian counterparts and with later adaptations of western stories. This combination of such disparate narrative material aims to highlight both the wealth of medieval storytelling and the fundamental unity of the medieval Mediterranean world. Contributors are Carolina Cupane, Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Massimo Fusillo, Corinne Jouanno, Grammatiki A. Karla, Bettina Krönung, Renata Lavagnini, Ulrich Moennig, Ingela Nilsson, Claudia Ott, Oliver Overwien, Panagiotis Roilos, Julia Rubanovich, Ida Toth, Robert Volk and Kostas Yiavis.
