Preface to the second editionPart I: Cosimo de Medici and the foundations of the Medici RegimePart II: Piero di Cosimo: Republican Reaction and Medicean RestorationPart III: Lorenzo di Piero: the Medici at the Height of their PowerEpilogue: Piero di Lorenzo and the Fall of the RegimeAppendices
The innovative city culture of Florence was the crucible within which Renaissance ideas first caught fire. With its soaring cathedral dome and its classically-inspired palaces and piazzas, it is perhaps the finest single expression of a society that is still at its heart an urban one. For, as Brian Jeffrey Maxson reveals, it is above all the city-state – the walled commune which became the chief driver of European commerce, culture, banking and art – that is medieval Italy's enduring legacy to the present. Charting the transition of Florence from an obscure Guelph republic to a regional superpower in which the glittering court of Lorenzo the Magnificent became the pride and envy of the continent, the author authoritatively discusses a city that looked to the past for ideas even as it articulated a novel creativity. Uncovering passionate dispute and intrigue, Maxson sheds fresh light too on seminal events like the fiery end of oratorical firebrand Savonarola and Giuliano de' Medici's brutal murder by the rival Pazzi family. This book shows why Florence, harbinger and heartland of the Renaissance, is and has always been unique.
Niccol- Machiavelli is the most prominent and notorious theorist of violence in the history of European political thought - prominent, because he is the first to candidly discuss the role of violence in politics; and notorious, because he treats violence as virtue rather than as vice. In this original interpretation, Yves Winter reconstructs Machiavelli's theory of violence and shows how it challenges moral and metaphysical ideas. Winter attributes two central theses to Machiavelli: first, violence is not a generic technology of government but a strategy that tends to correlate with inequality and class conflict; and second, violence is best understood not in terms of conventional notions of law enforcement, coercion, or the proverbial 'last resort', but as performance. Most political violence is effective not because it physically compels another agent who is thus coerced; rather, it produces political effects by appealing to an audience. As such, this book shows how in Machiavelli's world, violence is designed to be perceived, experienced, remembered, and narrated.
Amongst the oldest universities that of the Roman curia is the Great Unkown; little is known of the university of Rome (and of Avignon till 1378). To compensate the loss of sources materials mainly from the Vatican were intensively analysed and a prosopography of the dons and students (694 biograms in annex) drawn up. Some results: all three were legal universities of the southern type. The curial university was itinerant, it was continued at the general councils. Only when the curia resided there untroubled, the local schools of Rome (and Avignon) became great, international universities and different forms of association with the curial university were tried on. Rome was sought after by students from all over Europe for study of legal theory whereas praxis was learned at the papal court. Another attraction of Rome were the possibilities of attaining higher academic grades without much ceremony (first in theology, later also in law).
This is the first work by Giovanni Caroli (1428–1503) to appear in print. Caroli was one of the leading theologians in Florence during the last decades of the fifteenth century, a man who lived between the two great traditions of his time: the scholastic and the humanist. The volume contains a critical edition of the Latin text, entitled The Book of My Days in Lucca, an English translation, commentary notes and an introduction. Caroli presents us with his powerful personal reaction to the institutional crisis regarding the required reform in the Dominican Order, yet even here we already notice the pervasive influence of his classical education, and especially his acquaintance with authors such as Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, and especially Virgil.
The central feature of every true lottery is that all rational evaluation is deliberately excluded. Once this principle is grasped, the author argues, we can begin to understand exactly what benefits sortition can bring to the political community. The book includes a study of the use of sortition in ancient Athens and in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It also includes commentary on the contributions to sortition made by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington and Paine; an account of the history of the randomly-selected jury; and new research into lesser-known examples from England, America and revolutionary France.
Like many inhabitants of booming metropolises, Machiavelli alternated between love and hate for his native city. He often wrote scathing remarks about Florentine political myopia, corruption, and servitude, but also wrote about Florence with pride, patriotism, and confident hope of better times. Despite the alternating tones of sarcasm and despair he used to describe Florentine affairs, Machiavelli provided a stubbornly persistent sense that his city had all the materials and potential necessary for a wholesale, triumphant, and epochal political renewal. As he memorably put it, Florence was "truly a great and wretched city." Mark Jurdjevic focuses on the Florentine dimension of Machiavelli's political thought, revealing new aspects of his republican convictions. Through The Prince, Discourses, correspondence, and, most substantially, Florentine Histories, Jurdjevic examines Machiavelli's political career and relationships to the republic and the Medici. He shows that significant and as yet unrecognized aspects of Machiavelli's political thought were distinctly Florentine in inspiration, content, and purpose. From a new perspective and armed with new arguments, A Great and Wretched City reengages the venerable debate about Machiavelli's relationship to Renaissance republicanism. Dispelling the myth that Florentine politics offered Machiavelli only negative lessons, Jurdjevic argues that his contempt for the city's shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of its unrealized political potential.