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 Leonardo da Vinci written by Stephen J. Campbell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2025-02-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How our image of the Renaissance’s most famous artist is a modern myth Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo’s life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value. In this original and provocative book, Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo’s contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo’s life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.
Download or read book Brilliant Bodies written by Timothy McCall and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies, Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati—gorgeously dressed and adorned men—to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power. Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials. This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.
Download or read book The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy c 1494 c 1559 written by Alexander Lee and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first comprehensive survey of regime change in Italy in the period c.1494–c.1559. Far from being a purely modern phenomenon, regime change was a common feature of life in Renaissance Italy – no more so than during the Italian Wars (1494–1559). During those turbulent years, governments rose and fell with dizzying regularity. Some changes of regime were peaceful; others were more violent. But whenever a new reggimento took power, old social tensions were laid bare and new challenges emerged – any of which could easily threaten its survival. This provoked a variety of responses, both from newly established regimes and from their opponents. Constitutional reforms were proposed and enacted; civic rituals were developed; works of art were commissioned; literary works were penned; and occasionally, aspects of material culture were pressed into service, as well. Comparative in approach and broad in scope, it offers a provocative new view of the diverse political, culture, and economic factors, which ensured the survival (or demise) of regimes – not only in "major" polities like Florence, Rome, and Venice, but also in less-well-studied regions like Savoy. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in cultural, political, and military history.
Download or read book Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy written by Samuel K. Cohn Jr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy is the first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on over 100 contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo's diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. Cohn finds new developments during the early modern period such as an increase in women rebels, mutinies of soldiers, and new tactics of revolts such as shop closures, peaceful demonstrations of strength, and use of religious processions for discussions of tactics and strategies for obtaining logistic advantage. At the same time, these protests show convergences with the medieval Italian past, with leaders coming almost exclusively from the ranks of nonelites, religious ideology playing a surprisingly minor role, and the majority of revolts centring overwhelming in towns and cities. Finally, this study demonstrates that democracies do not just die under the duress of military occupation and growing powers of autocratic regimes. Ideals of representation and equality not only persisted; they could emerge in new forms and with greater sophistication.
Download or read book Making the Renaissance Man written by Timothy McCall and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2024-01-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo’s David, the pugnacious, passionate, and—crucially—important story of Renaissance manhood. Making the Renaissance Man explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt—all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.
Download or read book Jus Gentium in Humanist Jurisprudence written by Susan Longfield Karr and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-01-23 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the fathers of humanist jurisprudence contributed to the emergence of ius gentium as the common law not simply of Europe, but of all mankind, in the early sixteenth century.
Download or read book Elite Women and the Italian Wars 1494 1559 written by Susan Broomhall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Element analyses the critical importance of elite women to the conflict conventionally known as the Italian Wars that engulfed much of Europe and the Mediterranean between 1494 and 1559. Through its considered attention to the interventions of women connected to imperial, royal and princely dynasties, the authors show the breadth and depth of the opportunities, roles, impact, and influence that certain women had to shape the course of the conflict in both wartime activities and in peace-making. The work thus expands the ways in which the authors can think about women's participation in war and politics. It makes use of a wide range of sources such as literature, art and material culture, as well as more conventional text forms. Women's voices and actions are prioritized in making sense of evidence and claims about their activities.
Download or read book Approaches to the History of Written Culture written by Martyn Lyons and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the history of writing as a cultural practice in a variety of contexts and periods. It analyses the rituals and practices determining intimate or ‘ordinary’ writing as well as bureaucratic and religious writing. From the inscribed images of ‘pre-literate’ societies, to the democratization of writing in the modern era, access to writing technology and its public and private uses are examined. In ten studies, presented by leading historians of scribal culture from seven countries, the book investigates the uses of writing in non-alphabetical as well as alphabetical script, in societies ranging from Native America and ancient Korea to modern Europe. The authors emphasise the material characteristics of writing, and in so doing they pose questions about the definition of writing itself. Drawing on expertise in various disciplines, they give an up-to-date account of the current state of knowledge in a field at the forefront of ‘Book History’.
Download or read book Feeling Things written by Stephanie Downes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-13 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another. The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.
Download or read book Chambers s Edinburgh Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chambers s Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dukes Poets in Ferrara written by Edmund Garratt Gardner and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dukes and Poets in Ferrata written by Edmund G. Gardner and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Catholicism in Modern Italy written by John Pollard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Pollard's book surveys the relationship between Catholicism and the process of change in Italy from Unification to the present day. Central to the book is the complex set of relationships between traditional religion and the forces of change. In a broad sweep, Catholicism in Modern Italy looks at the cultural, social, political and economic aspects of the Catholic church and its relationship to the different experiences across Italy over this dramatic period of change and 'modernisation'.
Download or read book SEC and Citicorp written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Undone written by Michael Kimball and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A debut novel of love, loss, redemption and betrayal in which one man, in a bid to get his hands on a stash of dirty money without being sent to jail, fakes his own death and, with his wife, sets up a new identity in the Caymen Islands. But things do not go quite according to plan.
