Make-Up as Understructure: Renaissance Cosmetics as Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Cosmetics – like fashion in general – clearly seem to have experienced a notable expansion in their use toward the end of the medieval period.
Book Review: A Thing Done, by Tinney Sue Heath
I’ve read a lot of historical novels over the last few years but I have to say that hands down, this one is at the top of my list.
Glass Bridges: Cross-Cultural Exchange between Florence and the Ottoman Empire
During the medieval period, the main aim of the crusades was recovery of the Holy Land. However, this changed in the fifteenth century for various reasons.
Chivalry and Public Disorder in Thirteenth-Century Florence
The was the second of two fabulous papers given at the my first session on Medieval violence. Whereas the first paper in this series looked at violence in the university setting, this one tackled violence in an elite sphere – Florentine knights and their retinues.
Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence
What were the social and institutional factors that led to, and reinforced, the precocious emergence of Florentine commercial capitalism, especially in the domain of international merchant banking?
Femininity in the Marketplace: The Ideal Woman in Fourteenth-Century Florence
Throughout this period, in advice manuals and in humanistic dialogues, writers emphasize the importance of learning to read and write, and of gaining the social skills necessary for creating a network of friends; these were considered
necessary abilities for becoming a successful merchant and citizen.
Lodovico Capponi: A Florentine Banker and a Lending Transaction in 16th Century Florence
This paper examines how loans transpired in early 16th century Italy, taking a look at a specific transaction involving Lodovico Capponi of Florence and the Vatican in Rome.
Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art
A symposium held at the Art Gallery of Ontario offered new insights into the artistic community of 14th-century Florence.
500-year-old arrest warrant for Machiavelli discovered
The original copy of a proclamation – exactly 500-years old – calling for the arrest of Niccolò Machiavelli has been discovered by a British historian.
Transvestites, Saints, Wives, and Martyrs: The Lives of female saints as read by fifteenth-century Florentine women
An examination of the lives of female saints taken from the highly popular vernacular Vite dei santi padri written by Domenico Cavalca (c.1270-1342) and the ways women in quattrocento Florence may have been reading them.
The Duomo: The Touchstone of Florence
The Duomo, ‘cathedral’ in Italian, is the touchstone of Florence’s architectural achievements and was built to serve forever as a symbol of Florence’s power and prosperity to the surrounding Tuscan communities.
A Private Chapel as Burial Space : Filippo Strozzi with Filippino Lippi and Benedetto da Maiano in Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Chapel decoration as burial space in Renaissance Florence had two distinct tendencies, apparently opposing but not necessarily mutually exclusive.
For reasons of state: political executions, republicanism, and the Medici in Florence, 1480-1560
This article explores how the changing nature of punishment for political crimes in Renaissance Florence from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries can be read as a barometer of political change in the city.
Cum Status Ecclesie Noster Sit: Florence and the Council of Pisa (1409)
Of all the divisions and crises that the Catholic church endured in its first fifteen hundred years of existence, none was so destructive as the Great Schism (1378-1417)
The tower societies of medieval Florence
This thesis addresses the topic of the tower societies of medieval Florence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Women on the margins: the ‘beloved’ and the ‘mistress’ in Renaissance Florence
This article will discuss women who found themselves in irregular relationships in late medieval and Renaissance Florence.
Marriage and elite structure in Reinassance Florence; 1282-1500
About 10,500 dated marriages among Florentine surnamed families, over the period 1282-1500, have been collected and computerized from a variety of sources.
Economy of Ragusa, 1300 – 1800: The Tiger of Mediaeval Mediterranean
An economist is indeed tempted to think of Ragusa as the “Adriatic Tiger “ of yesteryear, an early example of a small open economy with strong fundamentals, and to hypothesize further that, in analogy to the current consensus about what it takes to minimize the impact of external crises, these strengths also allowed Ragusa to mitigate the effects of the many external shocks and financial crises in Medieval Europe.
The beginnings of Florence Cathedral. A political interpretation
That the Cathedral project emerged in the context of the complex struggle between elite and popolo in 1293-95 already suggests its heavily politicized origins.
Jews and Magic in Medici Florence
Between 1615 and 1620, Benedetto Blanis (c.1580-c.1647), a Jewish scholar and businessman in the Florentine ghetto, sent 196 letters to Don Giovanni dei Medici (1567-1621), an influential member of the ruling family.
Long Distance Trade Partnerships and Social dynamic in Medieval Genoa
Likewise, for those specifically addressing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the participation of the dominant class to the Italian medieval commercial revolution often run contrary to account that pits the nobility against the urban merchants.
‘Guelphs! Faction, Liberty and Sovereignty: Inquiries about the Quattrocento’
Such an approach has not always been the obvious one, as the centuries- long debate about the nature of the Italian noble (or magnate) and Popolo fac- tions suggests. Gaetano Salvemini’s 1899 interpretation of Florentine political conflict in the thirteenth century as the clash between two groups with distinct socio-economic characters and political programmes was probably as much indebted to Machiavelli as to the author’s socialist beliefs
Spectacular Antiquities: power and display of anticaglie at the court of Cosimo I de’ Medici
Florentines were interested in the early history of their city. Several founding legends were developed over the centuries, some of which owed more to fantasy than to history, but all of which insisted that Florence was an ancient city, going back at least to the late Roman Republic.
Marsilio Ficino: Magnus of the Renaissance, Shaper of Leaders
This article describes the life and work of Marsilio Ficino, a philosopher and leader of 15th century Florence who helped spark the Renaissance and the relevance of his ideas for the challenges we face today.
A Renaissance Instrument to Support Nonprofits: The Sale of Private Chapels in Florentine Churches
Most visitors to Florence today assume that the extraordinary examples of religious art and architecture were commissioned by the local church, and that each church was largely controlled by the Vatican. In fact, most church art was privately commissioned and privately owned, and the local churches had a large degree of local autonomy.