Weddings in fifteenth-century Italian courts were grand, sumptuous affairs that often required guests to listen attentively to lengthy orations given in Latin. In this book, Anthony D'Elia shows how Italian humanists used these orations to support claims of legitimacy and assertions of superiority among families jockeying for power, as well as to advocate for marriage and sexual pleasure.
Humanists stressed the value of marriage in practical terms as a means for consolidating wealth, forming political alliances, and maintaining power by providing heirs. They also presented women in...
Weddings in fifteenth-century Italian courts were grand, sumptuous affairs that often required guests to listen attentively to lengthy orations giv...
Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481), historian, political theorist, and author of a best-selling cookbook, began life as a mercenary soldier and ended it as the head of the Vatican Library. A papal official under the humanist Pope Pius II, he was a member of the humanist academies of Cardinal Bessarion and Pomponio Leto, and was twice imprisoned for conspiring against Pope Paul II. Returning to favor under Pope Sixtus IV, he composed his most famous work, a biographical compendium of the Roman popes from St. Peter down to his own time. The work critically synthesized a wide range of sources and...
Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481), historian, political theorist, and author of a best-selling cookbook, began life as a mercenary soldier and ended it a...
In 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, publicly damning a living man. The target was Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and a patron of the arts with ties to the Florentine Renaissance. Condemned to an afterlife of torment, he was burned in effigy in several places in Rome. What had this cultivated nobleman done to merit such a fate?
Pagan Virtue in a Christian World examines anew the contributions and contradictions of the Italian Renaissance, and in particular how the recovery of Greek and Roman literature and art led to a revival of pagan...
In 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, publicly damning a living man. The target was Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord o...
