The Horizon Book Of Daily Life In Renaissance Italy

Contrasts Italian Renaissance cultural, economic, and technological achievements with the widespread crime, violence, and political greed of the era.

A clear, lively, and deeply informed survey of life in Renaissance Italy for students and general readers, this book presents a thoughtful cultural and social anthropology of practices, values, and negotiations. Lively and reader-friendly, this second edition of Daily Life in Renaissance Italy provides a colorful and accurate sense of how it felt to inhabit the Renaissance Italian world (1400–1600). In clearly written chapters, the book moves from Renaissance Italy's geography to its society, and then to family. It also looks at hierarchies, moralities, devices for keeping social order, media and communications and the arts, space, time, the life cycle, material culture, health, and illness, and finishes with work and play. This new edition is especially alert to the rich connections between Italy and the rest of Europe, and with Africa and Asia. The book synthesizes a great deal of recent scholarship on social and material history, paying additional attention to the arts and religion. Readers are given an inside view of people from every social class, elite and ordinary, men and women. Written for students of all levels, from secondary school up, it is also an accessible introduction for travelers to Italy.

Students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to go beyond the standard names and subjects will find in this text abundant information on the lives, customs, beliefs, and practices of those who lived during this exciting time period. The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia engages all of the Italian peninsula from the Black Death (1347–1352) to 1600. Unlike other encyclopedic works about the Renaissance era, this book deals exclusively with Italy, revealing the ways common Italian people lived and experienced the events and technological developments that marked the Renaissance era. The coverage specifically spotlights marginal or traditionally marginalized groups, including women, homosexuals, Jews, the elderly, and foreign communities in Italian cities. The entries in this two-volume set are organized into 10 sections of 25 alphabetically listed entries each. Among the broad sections are art, fashion, family and gender, food and drink, housing and community, politics, recreation and social customs, and war. The "See Also" sources for each article are listed by section for easy reference, a feature that students and researchers will greatly appreciate. The extensive collection of contemporary documents include selections from a diary, letters, a travel journal, a merchant's inventory, Inquisition testimony, a metallurgical handbook, and text by an artist that describes what the author feels constitutes great work. Each of the primary source documents accompanies a specific article and provides an added dimension and degree of insight to the material.

Discover what life was like for ordinary people in Renaissance Italy through this unique resource that paints a full portrait of everday living.

Discover what life was like for ordinary people in Renaissance Italy through this unique resource that paints a full portrait of everday living.

Did ordinary Italians have a 'Renaissance'? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenthcentury visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and families at artisanal levels (such as shoemakers, barbers, bakers and innkeepers) lived and worked, managed their household economies and consumption, socialised in their homes, and engaged with the arts and the markets for luxury goods. It demonstrates that although the economic and social status of local craftsmen and traders was relatively low, their material possessions show how these men and women who rarely make it into the history books were fully engaged with contemporary culture, cultural customs and the urban way of life.