This is a new, inclusive history of the Italian Renaissance. The book examines the Renaissance in a broad sense, chronologically, socially and geographically, bringing these elements together under a fresh analytic framework. The narrative covers the Italian historical experience and the peninsula's changing social conditions over a long span, from 1150 to 1650, but focussing mainly on the years c. 1250 to 1550. The book is organised chronologically into three main parts. The thematic scope of the first narrative section is local and preliminary - examining late medieval Italy and the independent economic, political and intellectual life of the northern half of the peninsula up to the fourteenth century. The next section centres on the mid-fourteenth through to the fifteenth centuries, to examine the evolution of the territorial states that emerged from the Communes. The final section examines the final, comparatively brief historical moment of the early sixteenth century, when some Italian territorial states became world states, and in the process created the High Renaissance culture of Raphael, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Castiglione and Tasso.
Throughout the book, the author discusses the manifestations of Renaissance life across Italy, balancing the experience of the traditional cultural capitals of Rome, Florence and Venice, with that of smaller centres such as Milan, Genoa, Naples, Bologna, and a host of smaller provincial cities. He also examines a broad cross section of those who shared in the culture and society of the Renaissance. He presents not just the few, ruling families or a handful of elite 'umanisti', but a wide range from princes and merchants to working men and women, to mendicants and the dispossessed. In doing so, he offers an overview that, at last, reflects the dynamism of recent historical scholarship and demonstrates the diversity of Italian Renaissance life.
- ISBN10 0631229418
- ISBN13 9780631229414
- Publish Date 4 August 2003
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 5 August 2004
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
- Imprint Blackwell Publishers
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English