This volume gathers together seventeen original essays that represent the new directions being taken by historians of the Florentine Renaissance. Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These essays offer new and exemplary approaches toward state-building, political vocabulary, political economy, civic humanism, local history and social patronage.

Everyone has the capacity for emotions. But the way emotions are perceived, expressed, and sharedthat is determined by the rules imposed by the society of the time, along with language, cultural practices, expectations, and moral beliefs. In this fascinating look at the interplay of power with public and private emotions in fifteenth-century Italy, Fabrizio Ricciardelli, Andrea Zorzi, and their contributors show that emotions are created by the society in which they are expressed and conditioned. Exploring a variety of official discourses, cultural phenomena, and artifacts, the essays here...