Author: Marta Celati
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192608975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Conspiracy has been a political phenomenon throughout history, relevant to any form of power from antiquity to the post-modern era. This means of resistance against power was prevalent during the Renaissance, and the Italian fifteenth century, in particular, can be regarded as an 'age of plots'. This book offers the first full-length investigation of Italian Renaissance literature on the topic of conspiracy. This literature covered a range of different genres and it enjoyed widespread diffusion during the second half of the fifteenth century, when the development of this literary production was connected with the affirmation of centralized political thought and princely ideology in Italian states. The centrality of conspiracies also emerges in the sixteenth century in Machiavelli's work, where the topic is closely interlaced with problems of building political consensus and management of power. This volume presents case studies of the most significant humanist texts (representative of different states, literary genres, and of prominent authors—Alberti, Poliziano, Pontano—and minor, yet important, literati), and it also investigates Machiavelli's political and historical works. Through interdisciplinary analysis, this study traces the evolution of literature on plots in early Renaissance Italy. It points out the key function of the classical tradition and the recurring narrative approaches, the historiographical techniques, and the ideological angles that characterize the literary transfiguration of the topic. This volume also offers a reconsideration of the complex facets of humanist political literature that played a crucial role in the development of a new theory of statecraft.
Author: Marta Celati
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192608967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Conspiracy has been a political phenomenon throughout history, relevant to any form of power from antiquity to the post-modern era. This means of resistance against power was prevalent during the Renaissance, and the Italian fifteenth century, in particular, can be regarded as an 'age of plots'. This book offers the first full-length investigation of Italian Renaissance literature on the topic of conspiracy. This literature covered a range of different genres and it enjoyed widespread diffusion during the second half of the fifteenth century, when the development of this literary production was connected with the affirmation of centralized political thought and princely ideology in Italian states. The centrality of conspiracies also emerges in the sixteenth century in Machiavelli's work, where the topic is closely interlaced with problems of building political consensus and management of power. This volume presents case studies of the most significant humanist texts (representative of different states, literary genres, and of prominent authors—Alberti, Poliziano, Pontano—and minor, yet important, literati), and it also investigates Machiavelli's political and historical works. Through interdisciplinary analysis, this study traces the evolution of literature on plots in early Renaissance Italy. It points out the key function of the classical tradition and the recurring narrative approaches, the historiographical techniques, and the ideological angles that characterize the literary transfiguration of the topic. This volume also offers a reconsideration of the complex facets of humanist political literature that played a crucial role in the development of a new theory of statecraft.
Author: Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108988687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
This Element explores the longest spell that can be computed from quantifiable fiscal records when the gap between rich and poor narrowed. It was the post-Black-Death century, c. 1375 to c. 1475. Paradoxically, with economic equality and prosperity on the rise, peasants, artisans and shopkeepers suffered losses in political representation and status within cultural spheres. Threatened by growing economic equality after the Black Death, elites preserved and then enhanced their political, social, and cultural distinction predominantly through noneconomic means and within political and cultural spheres. By investigating the interactions between three 'elements'-economics, politics, and culture-this Element presents new facets in the emergence of early Renaissance society in Italy.
Author: Martin L. McLaughlin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
The concept of imitatio - the imitation of classical and vernacular texts - was the dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. Linked to modern notions of intertextuality, imitation has been much discussed recently, but this is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on imitation, covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and vernacular works. Martin McLaughlin charts the emergence of the idea, in vague terms in Dante, then in Petrarch's more precise reconstruction of classical imitatio, before concentrating on the major writers of the Quattrocento. Some chapters deal with key humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and Pico della Mirandola, while others discuss each of the major vernacular figures in the debate, including Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. For the first time scholars and students have an up-to-date account of the development of Ciceronianism in both Latin and the vernacular before 1530, and the book provides fresh insights into some of the canonical works of Italian literature from Dante to Bembo.
Author: Marcello Simonetta
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385526806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved. The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi Conspiracy. More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place. In The Montefeltro Conspiracy, Simonetta unravels this plot, showing not only how the plot came together but how its failure (only one of the Medici brothers, Giuliano, was killed; Lorenzo survived) changed the course of Italian and papal history for generations. In the course of his gripping narrative, we encounter the period’s most colorful characters, relive its tumultuous politics, and discover that two famous paintings, including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding revenge.
Author: Cecilia Mary Ady
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780340058534
Category : Florence (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Pazzi conspiracy - Medici circle - Florence and the Italian renaissance - Medici bank.
Author: Nicholas Terpstra
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Capital punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
This volume focuses on a feature of executions that was unique to Renaissance Italy: the presence in prisons and on scaffolds of laymen, gathered in confraternities called "conforterie," who worked with prisoners to prepare them spiritually and psychologically for execution. The book includes both primary sources and a series of essays that expand on the theatrical, artistic, theological, musical, and historical contexts of comforting.
Author: Donna Russo Morin
Publisher: Next Chapter
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
In 15th century Florence, five women and a legendary artist weave together a dangerous plot that could bring peace - or get them all killed. Seeking to wrest power from the Medici, members of the Pazzi family slay the beloved Giuliano. But Lorenzo de' Medici survives the attack and seeks revenge on everyone involved, plunging the city into murderous chaos. Bodies are dragged through the streets, and no one is safe. Five women steal away to a church to ply their craft in secret. Viviana, Fiammetta, Isabetta, Natasia and Mattea are painters, not allowed to be public with their skill but freed from the restrictions in their lives by their art. When a sixth member of their group, Lapaccia, goes missing and is rumored to have stolen a much sought-after painting before she vanished, the women must venture out into the dangerous streets to find their friend. They will have help from one of the most renowned painters of their era: the peaceful and kind Leonardo da Vinci. It is under his tutelage that they flourish as artists and with his access that they infiltrate some of the highest, most secretive places in Florence, unraveling one conspiracy as they build another in its place. Vibrant and absorbing, Portrait Of A Conspiracy is the first novel in Donna Russo Morin's Da Vinci's Disciples series.
Author: Alessandro Campi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429865430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
The theme of conspiracy is central to Machiavelli's writing. His work offers observations and analysis of conspiracy as part of the armoury of the Renaissance politician. Surprisingly, the theme has not yet received the attention it merits. This volume corrects an interpretation which reduces Machiavelli's position to one of censorious observer of conspiracies. Quite to the contrary, as Campi demonstrates, Machiavelli developed an anatomy of conspiracy and provided a practical manual for coup d'état" and violent seizure of power.
Author: Lauro Martines
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
One of the world's leading historians of Renaissance Italy brings to life here the vibrant--and violent--society of fifteenth-century Florence. His disturbing narrative opens up an entire culture, revealing the dark side of Renaissance man and politician Lorenzo de' Medici. On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood moves outward in time and space from that murderous event, unfolding a story of tangled passions, ambition, treachery, and revenge. The conspiracy was led by one of the city's most noble clans, the Pazzi, financiers who feared and resented the Medici's swaggering new role as political bosses--but the web of intrigue spread through all of Italy. Bankers, mercenaries, the Duke of Urbino, the King of Naples, and Pope Sixtus IV entered secretly into the plot. Florence was plunged into a peninsular war, and Lorenzo was soon fighting for his own and his family's survival. The failed assassination doomed the Pazzi. Medici revenge was swift and brutal--plotters were hanged or beheaded, innocents were hacked to pieces, and bodies were put out to dangle from the windows of the government palace. All remaining members of the larger Pazzi clan were forced to change their surname, and every public sign or symbol of the family was expunged or destroyed. April Blood offers us a fresh portrait of Renaissance Florence, where dazzling artistic achievements went side by side with violence, craft, and bare-knuckle politics. At the center of the canvas is the figure of Lorenzo the Magnificent--poet, statesman, connoisseur, patron of the arts, and ruthless "boss of bosses." This extraordinarily vivid account of a turning point in the Italian Renaissance is bound to become a lasting work of history.
