This volume puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. The contributors include English, Italian, American and Australian scholars. The volume focuses on new material and addresses all stages in the judicial process from the drafting of laws to the rounding up of bandits. The articles range geographically across most of the peninsula. This is the only single-volume treatment available on the subject in English.

This book examines the life of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453 1524) from a variety of perspectives and using a range of techniques. It analyses the relationship between Machiavelli, Piero and Francesco Soderini, and reinstates the crucial role played by Rome and contacts with Rome in late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Florentine politics. Soderini's position as one of the chief powerbrokers of papal Rome, in opposition to the Medici, enables a reappraisal of political and ecclesiastical patronage and clientele systems. The cardinal also encouraged cultural, intellectual and...

Analyzing convent culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the medium of three unpublished nuns' chronicles, this study examines the nuns' intellectual and imaginative achievements to determine how they preserved individual and convent identities by writing chronicles. The chronicles reveal many examples of the nuns' achievements, especially with regard to cultural creativity, and demonstrate that convent traditions ultimately determined the cultural priorities that dictated convent ceremonial life.

It is often said that marriage is a central or basic institution of society. This was perhaps more true in the past, or true in different ways, in periods when many marriages were arranged by parents, when brides were accompanied by dowries, and when marriage was used symbolically to represent the union of nuns to Christ or of rulers to their states. This volume examines four of the main areas of importance in the history of marriage: first, the wedding itself, its economics and trappings; the laws that aimed to regulate aspects of marriage; intermarriage among social groups; and, finally,...

This invaluable collection explores the many faces of murder and its cultural presences across the Italian peninsula in the Renaissance.

Leading experts from the disciplines of history, literature, art history and anthropology examine black African experiences and representations from slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by Renaissance ideas and conditions.