Author: John E. Law
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351950355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
Building on important issues highlighted by the late Philip Jones, this volume explores key aspects of the city state in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy, particularly the nature and quality of different types of government. It focuses on the apparently antithetical but often similar governmental forms represented by the republics and despotisms of the period. Beginning with a reprint of Jones's original 1965 article, the volume then provides twenty new essays that re-examine the issues he raised in light of modern scholarship. Taking a broad chronological and geographic approach, the collection offers a timely re-evaluation of a question of perennial interest to urban and political historians, as well as those with an interest in medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Author: James Hankins
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674242521
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 769
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Book Description
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.
Author: Sarah Rubin Blanshei
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149854634X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
This collection of essays offers a unique contribution to the study of violence and justice in a late medieval and early modern Italy by combining a multivocal perspective with a case-study focus on the city-state of Bologna. Drawing on the city’s singularly rich archival resources, the authors explore various facets of violence—ranging from the interpersonal to the less frequently studied typologies of blasphemy, rape, political rebellion, and student brawls—and set the institutions of the police and law courts into their socio-political and cultural contexts. They also apply a broad variety of quantitative and qualitative approaches—processual, microhistorical, legalism, comparative and criminological—to their assessments of the procedures and practices of criminal justice and the experiences of violent behavior, providing both short-term, in-depth analyses of specific events and over-arching reviews of long-term trends. Bologna itself, with its renowned university, economic innovations, strategic importance as a commercial and cultural crossroads, its political volatility and experiments with diverse constitutional structures, provides a rewarding laboratory for analyzing changes and continuities in late medieval and early modern violence and justice. From these studies emerges a narrative that challenges the traditional portrayal of those periods as eras when brutality and rage were “normal” in social relations and criminal justice was characterized mainly by punitive strategies of torture and repression.
Author: Norman Abjorensen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538120747
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 551
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Book Description
Democracy is easy to talk about but hard to define in other than broad generalizations; its history is a long, complex, and contested subject. What this volume seeks to do is to explore the general evolution of political and social thinking that would eventually coalesce into what we now know as democracy, for all its imperfections and shortcomings. The question of just why some societies evolved into a democratic trajectory and others did not continues to engage the interest of historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Much conjecture surrounds the rise of certain elements we now recognize if not as democratic, then proto-democratic, such as collective decision-making, constraints on the exercise of power and a degree of accountability of the ruler to the ruled. If democracy in the sense of “rule by the people” has two essential qualities – rule by the majority and the equal treatment of free citizens - then its origins, however feeble, are to be found in these early examples of government. Historical Dictionary of Democracy contains a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about democracy.
Author: Richard MacKenney
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442621222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
This study re-examines Venice’s political economy from the viewpoint of its ordinary people or popolani who, despite the commonly held view that they were excluded from political life by the nobility or nobili, actually organized and ran for themselves hundreds of corporations within the city-state. Mercy was central to this popolani’s Christian values and those who offered mercy to their fellow men and women in temporary hardship were investing in the expectation of reciprocity in their own time of need. Beginning by tracing a formative linking of religion, economy, and polity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, Venice as the Polity of Mercy then chronicles the collapse of this triad during the struggles between church and state in the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, followed by a revitalizing reconnection of economy and polity within a different religious climate after the plague of 1630. As such, Richard Mackenney’s book offers up a revitalized image of Renaissance Venetian society as dynamic rather than static, as well as a new understanding of the city’s significance through a reconfiguration of its history and artwork.
Author: Alison M. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429619200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
The Renaissance, now in its third edition, engages with earlier and current debates about the Renaissance, especially concerning its ‘modernity’, its elitism and gender bias and its globalism. This new edition has been revised to include a discussion of Venice, Rome, Naples and Florence and their relationship with surrounding courts and smaller provincial towns. Brown provides a fresh insight into some of the main themes of the Renaissance, with humanism now being explored in relation to gender, the position of women and the response of religious reformers to the new ideas. The broad geographical scope, concluding with an examination of diffusion through trade with Constantinople, Portugal and Spain, allows students to fully explore how the Renaissance transformed into a global movement. Key themes, such as humanism, art and architecture, Renaissance theatre and the invention of printing, are illustrated with quotations and exempla, making this book an invaluable source for students of the Renaissance, early modern history and social and cultural history.
Author: P. J. Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521023641
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
A detailed investigation into the origin, development and character of the Maltesta government and the causes of its overthrow.
Author: Randolph Starn
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520073838
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Jacob Burckhardt claimed that the state in Renaissance Italy became a work of art. In this book, the authors illiminate the corollary: that art in Italy became a work of state. They study centres of power under three distinctive governments - a civic republic of the 14th century, a princely court of the 15th, and an absolutist state of the 16th. The authors argue that, no less than armies, laws and taxes, painted halls of state were strategic instruments, tactical weapons and technical machines of government.
Author: Ian P. Wei
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107009693
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 461
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Book Description
This book explores the ideas of theologians at the medieval University of Paris and their attempts to shape society. Investigating their views on money, marriage and sex, Ian Wei reveals the complexity of what theologians had to say about the world around them, and the increasing challenges to their authority.
Author: Kira Robison
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004444114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
In Healers in the Making, Kira Robison investigates medical instruction at the University of Bologna using the lens of practical medicine, examining both the formation of medical authority and innovations in practical medical pedagogy during the late medieval period.
