Overview

This volume celebrates the many contributions of John M. Najemy to the study of Florentine and Italian Renaissance history. Over the last three decades Najemy’s many books and articles on Florentine politics and political thought have substantially revised the narratives and contours of these fields. They have also provided a framework into which he has woven many of the innovative new threads that have emerged in Renaissance social and cultural history. The essays here presented by some of Professor Najemy’s many students and friends aim both to highlight his varied interests and to suggest where they may point for future studies of Florence and, indeed, beyond Florence.

David S. Peterson is associate professor of history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.

Daniel E. Bornstein is professor of history and religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he holds the Stella K. Darrow Professorship in Catholic Studies.

518 pp. 
ISBN: 978-0-7727-2038-2 softcover 978-0-7727-2039-9 hardcover
Published: 2008

Contents

Illustrations

David S. Peterson with Daniel E. Bornstein, “Introduction”

I. Orientations
1. Gene Brucker, “The Uffizi Archives, 1952-1987: A Personal Memoir”
2. Anthony Molho, “Hans Baron’s Crisis”

II. Culture
3. James M. Blythe and John La Salle, “Did Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca) Insert Civic Humanist Ideas into Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Kingship? Reflections on a Newly Discovered Manuscript of Hans Baron”
4. William Hyland, “The Climacteric of Late Medieval Camaldolese Spirituality: Ambrogio Traversari, John-Jerome of Prague, and the Linea salutis heremitarum“
5. Nancy Bisaha, “‘Discourses of Power and Desire’: The Letters of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1453)”
6. Amy R. Bloch, “Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Arte di Calimala, and Fifteenth-Century Florentine Corporate Patronage”
7. Margaret Haines, “Oligarchy and Opera: Institution and Individuals in the Administration of the Florentine Cathedral”
8. Saundra Weddle, “Saints in the City and Poets at the Gates: The Codex Rustici as a Devotional and Civic Chronicle”
9. Robert Black, “Literacy in Florence, 1427”

III. Society
10. Chara Armon, “Fatherhood and the Language of Delight in Fifteenth-Century Italian Texts”
11. Alison Brown, “Women, Children and Politics in the Letters of a Florentine Notary, Ser Pace di Bambello”
12. Julius Kirshner, “Dowry, Domicile, and Citizenship in Late Medieval Florence”
13. Edward Muir, “In Some Neighbours We Trust: On the Exclusion of Women from the Public in Renaissance Italy”
14. P. Renée Baernstein, “Reprobates and Courtiers: Lay Masculinities in the Colonna Family, 1520-1584”
15. Alison Williams Lewin, “Age Does Not Matter: Venetian Doges in Reality and Depiction”

IV. Politics
16. Teresa Pugh Rupp, “‘If You Want Peace, Work for Justice’: Dino Compagni’s Cronica and the Ordinances of Justice”
17. Susannah F. Baxendale, “Alberti Kinship and Conspiracy in Late Medieval Florence”
18. Dale Kent, “A Window on Cosimo de’ Medici, Paterfamilias and Politician, from within His Own Household: The Letters of His Personal Assistant, Ser Alesso Pelli”
19. Margery A. Ganz, “The Medici Inner Circle: Working Together for Florence, 1420s-1450s”
20. Melissa Meriam Bullard, “‘Hammering Away at the Pope’: Nofri Tornabuoni, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Agent and Collaborator in Rome”
21. Mikael Hörnqvist, “Approaching the Medici: Machiavelli as Co-Author of Paolo Vettori’s Ricordi of 1512?”
22. Robert Fredona, “Liberate diuturna cura Italiam: Hannibal in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli”
23. David S. Peterson, “Machiavelli and the Petrine Succession”
24. Albert Russell Ascoli, “Clizia‘s Histories”
25. Humfrey C. Butters, “Machiavelli and the Enlightenment: Humanism, Political Theory and the Origins of the ‘Social Sciences'”

Reviews

Annali d’Italianistica, 27 (2009), pp. 386-388. Reviewed by William Sayers.

Canadian Journal of History, 45:2 (Fall 2010), pp. 335-346. Reviewed by Brian Maxson.

The Sixteenth Century Journal, 41:2 (Summer 2010), pp. 543-544. Reviewed by Neslihan Senocak. (Hard copy available at CRRS.)

The Catholic Historical Review, 96:3 (July 2010), pp. 539-541. Reviewed by Riccardo Fubini.

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40:1 (Summer 2009), pp. 99-100. Reviewed by John A. Marino.