Love And Marriage In Renaissance Florence

"Set against the grindstone of social class, this story of Lusanna versus Giovanni, gleaned from the archives of Renaissance Florence, throws a floodlight on relations between the sexes. Gene Brucker's wonderful account has remarkable resonance."—Lauro Martines, author of April Blood “In the years since it first appeared, Gene Brucker's Giovanni and Lusanna has attracted a large and loyal readership. There is no better introduction to the complex realities of life (and love) in Florence during the Renaissance.”—William J. Connell, Professor of History and La Motta Chair in Italian Studies, Seton Hall University PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITION: "At its core, this splendid study is about stubborn love and the forms of law, and the impossibility of each to accommodate the ultimate claims of the other."—New York Times Book Review

"Set against the grindstone of social class, this story of Lusanna versus Giovanni, gleaned from the archives of Renaissance Florence, throws a floodlight on relations between the sexes. Gene Brucker's wonderful account has remarkable resonance."—Lauro Martines, author of April Blood “In the years since it first appeared, Gene Brucker's Giovanni and Lusanna has attracted a large and loyal readership. There is no better introduction to the complex realities of life (and love) in Florence during the Renaissance.”—William J. Connell, Professor of History and La Motta Chair in Italian Studies, Seton Hall University PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITION: "At its core, this splendid study is about stubborn love and the forms of law, and the impossibility of each to accommodate the ultimate claims of the other."—New York Times Book Review

Accompanying an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, this catalogue explores one of the most important and historically neglected art forms of Renaissance Florence: cassoni - pairs of chests that were lavishly decorated with precious metals and elaborate paintings and were often the most expensive of a whole suite of decorative objects commissioned to celebrate marriage alliances between powerful families.

"Many famous artworks of the Italian Renaissance were made to celebrate love, marriage, and family. They were the pinnacles of a tradition, dating from early in the era, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, and the birth of children by commissioning extraordinary objects - maiolica, glassware, jewels, textiles, paintings - that were often also exchanged as gifts. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of artworks arising from Renaissance rituals of love and marriage and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. The impressive range of works gathered in these pages extends from birth trays painted in the early fifteenth century to large canvases on mythological themes that Titian painted in the mid-1500s. Each work of art would have been recognized by contemporary viewers for its prescribed function within the private, domestic domain."--BOOK JACKET.

Renaissance writer Laura Cereta (1469–1499) presents feminist issues in a predominantly male venue—the humanist autobiography in the form of personal letters. Cereta's works circulated widely in Italy during the early modern era, but her complete letters have never before been published in English. In her public lectures and essays, Cereta explores the history of women's contributions to the intellectual and political life of Europe. She argues against the slavery of women in marriage and for the rights of women to higher education, the same issues that have occupied feminist thinkers of later centuries. Yet these letters also furnish a detailed portrait of an early modern woman’s private experience, for Cereta addressed many letters to a close circle of family and friends, discussing highly personal concerns such as her difficult relationships with her mother and her husband. Taken together, these letters are a testament both to an individual woman and to enduring feminist concerns.

"A great virtue of this reader is the length of its selections--not just snippets, but long enough portions for students to get a real sense of how the text works." - Ruth Mazo Karras, University of Minnesota

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.