Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. While it has been traditionally viewed simply as the context for extraordinary artistic creativity, patronage has more recently been examined by historians and art historians alike as a comprehensive system of patron-client structures which permeated society and social relations. Focusing specifically on the city of Florence, these essays explore the new understanding of Renaissance Italy as a 'patronage society, ' considering its implications for the study of art patronage...

How were male bodies viewed before the Enlightenment? And what does this reveal about attitudes towards sex and gender in premodern Europe? This richly textured cultural history investigates the characterization of the sex of adult male bodies from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century. Before the modern focus on the phallic, penetrative qualities of male anatomy, Patricia Simons finds that men's bodies were considered in terms of their active physiological characteristics, in relation to semen, testicles and what was considered innately masculine heat. Re-orienting attention from an...