Cities and Statecraft in the Renaissance looks at the rise of trade, commerce, guilds, and the merchant and ruling classes in northern Europe. This influenced the growth of towns, cities, states, and regions, who competed with one another for power, artistic talent, and creativity. At the same time, people rich and poor were struggling to establish new forms of society and government.
Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year “Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.” —Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement “Magisterial...Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.” —Wall Street Journal “Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way...For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be...nothing less than transformative.” —Noel Malcolm, American Affairs “[A] masterpiece...It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents...and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.” —Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement “The lessons for today are clear and profound.” —Robert D. Kaplan Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft. A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.
Housecraft, and Statecraft offers a unique perspective on Venice and Venetian society as the city evolved from a merchant-dominated regime in the fifteenth century into an aristocratic oligarchy in the sixteenth. It traces the growth, within the elite, of a new sense of hierarchy and honor.
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.
A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (the book was written ca. 1490), the work depicts a debate between the king himself and a Florentine merchant. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language. --publisher's description.
This volume traces the logic of urban political conflict in late medieval Europe's most heavily urbanized regions, Italy and the Southern Low Countries. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are often associated with the increasing consolidation of states, but at the same time they also saw high levels of political conflict and revolt in cities that themselves were a lasting heritage of this period. In often radically different ways, conflict constituted a crucial part of political life in the six cities studied for this book: Bologna, Florence, and Verona, as well as Liege, Lille, and Tournai. The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities argues that such conflicts, rather than subverting ordinary political life, were essential features of the political systems that developed in cities. Conflicts were embedded in a polycentric political order characterized by multiple political units and bases of organization, ranging from guilds to external agencies. In this multi-faceted and shifting context, late medieval city dwellers developed particular strategies of legitimating conflict, diverse modes of behaviour, and various forms of association through which conflict could be addressed. At the same time, different configurations of these political units gave rise to distinct systems of conflict which varied from city to city. Across all these cities, conflict gave rise to a distinct form of political organization-and represents the nodal point around which this political and social history of cities is written.
Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure addresses the struggles of national and local states to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops fresh thinking on financialisation and city statecraft to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national ‘rebalancing’ efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.
From the 11th century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the late 13th century, when the regimes of individual “tyrants” took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government. The authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material, both documentary and literary, to portray the world of the republican regimes, focusing on the public spirit and factional strife that was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seedbeds of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance.
This book contains an innovative and important series of studies of the complex relations of major cities associated with key moments in the history of higher learning in the West. By exploring the interplay of university learning and civic culture over the centuries, Bender provides a novel perspective on the history of both universities and cities. The theme is pursued in studies of Bologna, Paris, Florence, Leiden, Geneva, Edinburgh, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Chicago, and New York by several distinguished scholars, including Gene Brucker, Carl Schorske, Edward Shils, Martin Jay, and Nathan Glazer.
Religion in the Renaissance features the growth and dominance of the Catholic Church in northern Europe, its influence on art and architecture, and how it was eventually challenged and by whom. Other religions were at best accepted but mostly suppressed, threatened, or violently overthrown. Kings and queens working with the Church dominated the political scene.
