Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence

Renaissance Florence has often been described as the birthplace of modern individualism, as reflected in the indiidual genius of its great artists, scholars, and statesmen. The historical research of recent decades has instead shown that Florentines during the Renaissance remained enmeshed in relationships of family, neighborhood, guild, patronage, and religion that, from a twenty-first-century perspective, greatly limited the scopeof individual thought and action. The sixteen essays in this volume expand the groundbreaking work of Gene Brucker, the historian who has been most responsible for the discovery and exploration of these premodern qualities of the Florentine Renaissance.
The essays, arranged in three groups, explore new approaches to the social world of Florentines during this fascinating era. The first group examines the exceptionally resilient and homogenous Florentine merchant elite, the true protaganist of much of Florentine history, looking at its relations with other social classes and its marriages, domestic space, and politics. The second group of essays addresses Florentine religion and Florence's turbulent relations with the Church. The last group studies criminals, expatriates, and other outsiders to Florentine society. Written by leading historians, the essays illustrate the ways Renaissance Florentines expressed or shaped their identity as they interacted with their society. Based on thorough archival scholarship, Society and the Individual in Renaissance Florencewill reshape our understandign of familiar texts, paradigms and truisms as it deomstrates the fertility and high standards of current Florentine historiography.

University of California Press
ISBN 0520232542