Numbers and Nationhood explores the rise of statistics as a mode of representation in Italian society during the nineteenth century. Silvana Patriarca examines the ideologies that informed numerical productions, and the role that statistics played in generating a national image of Italy that nevertheless accentuated its internal territorial divisions. This innovative study provides a fresh reading of the historiography of Risorgimento Italy, bringing issues of science, ideology and representation to the fore.

The Renaissance is still often wrongly characterized as a period of religious indifference. Contradicting that viewpoint, this book examines confraternities: lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs. Intensely local and dominated by artisans and craftsmen, the confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through various activities such as charitable work, public shrines, and processions. This book puts these religious activities into the turbulent social and political context of Renaissance Bologna.

This book relates the history of Italian railways and their relation with the Italian state from the 1840s, when the first lines were constructed, until nationalization in 1905. The effects of railway legislation are assessed, and various socio-economic indicators for the Italian regions are analyzed. It is shown that railways contributed little to the economic unification of Italy, and that any positive effects were felt mostly in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century and the process of unification, it is argued that railways had a pernicious and divisive influence on Italian...

This book provides the first full account of the Italian Sobility in the post-unification era, and challenges recent interpretations that have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites by highlighting the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy's most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles developed more indirect forms of influence, while remaining a separate and exclusive group with limited social contacts with industrial or managerial elites, until World War I transformed their old way of life.

This volume of essays offers a series of new insights into the "age of the Enlightenment," not only in Italy but throughout Europe. In its political reforms, intended to attack feudalism and the Church and to modernize the economic and judicial systems, Naples was influenced by European culture. But Naples also exercised a strong influence on European culture: the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the musical culture of the city, had great importance in shaping the modern, enlightened culture of Europe.

This book covers one of the most controversial subjects in Italian historiography, namely the success or failure of the Church's policy during the counter-Reformation to exert rigorous control not only over theology but over all branches of knowledge. By drawing extensively upon newly-opened sources in the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office, generally known as the "Inquisition," it affords a more articulated and objective assessment of the effects of ecclesiastical censorship on religion and culture in early modern Italy.

Between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries Italians frequently joined "confraternities" that made them symbolic brothers and sisters to one another. These kin groups launched extensive charitable programs, directed civic and religious rituals, and socialized members in class and gender roles. These essays examine how medieval religious and political values shaped early ritual kinship, how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and...

This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building her future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. In her extensive use of English and Italian archival sources, the author looks well beyond Braudel's influential picture of a Spanish-dominated Mediterranean world. In doing so she demonstrates some of the causes of Italy's decline and its subsequent relegation as a dominant force in world trade.

This study shows how theater was an important feature of convent life from the early fifteenth century, probably in all of Catholic Europe and its colonies. For this study, mainly devoted to Tuscany, the author has found an extensive corpus of theatrical works of convent provenance, which argues for the widespread practice of theater in the convents. She traces its chief characteristics--what the nuns' own writings tell us about their literacy and that of their audiences, and how their lives and work intersect with secular society and literary culture.

This study describes power and politics in Rome and the role of the papacy in European politics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It attempts to overcome the traditional historiographical approach to the role of the papacy during this period by focusing on the actual mechanisms of power in the papal court--political, personal, spiritual, and ceremonial. Based on new research in Italian and other European archives, it charts the transition from a political to a primarily spiritual power between the Renaissance and the Peace of Westphalia.