"Florence in the Early Modern World" offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within which the experience of Florence remains unique.
By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbours, this collection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere towards Florence. New techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the connections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe.
This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance.
Author(s): Nicholas Scott Baker, Brian Jeffrey Maxson (eds.)
Series: Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 278
List of tables vii
List of figures viii
Acknowledgments x
About the contributors xi
1. Where in the world is Renaissance Florence? Challenges for the history of the city after the global turn / Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson 1
PART I. Economic perspectives 19
2. Taking architectural theory on the road: the sliding scales of the Florentine traveler / Niall Atkinson 21
3. "Tutto il mondo è paese": locating Florence in premodern Eurasian commerce / Nicholas Scott Baker 50
4. Mapping gendered labor in the textile industry of early modern Florence / Nicholas Terpstra 68
5. Shaping the city and the landscape: politics, public space, and innovation under Ferdinando I de’ Medici / Marta Caroscio 92
PART II. Political perspectives 115
6. "Nelle parti di Romagna": the role and influence of the Apennine lords in Italian Renaissance politics / Luciano Piffanelli 117
7. The advantages of stability: Medici Tuscany’s ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean / Brian Brege 142
8. The Medici, maritime empire, and the enduring legacy of the Cavalieri di Santo Stefano / Katherine Poole-Jones 156
PART III. Cultural perspectives 187
9. Poggio’s beginnings at the papal curia: the Florentine brain drain and the fashioning of the humanist movement / Clémence Revest 189
10. The myth of the Renaissance bubble: international culture and regional politics in fifteenth-century Florence / Brian Jeffrey Maxson 213
11. New perspectives on patria: the Andreini performance of Florentine citizenship / Sarah Gwyneth Ross 236
Index 256
