Words And Deeds In Renaissance Rome

The social historian, searching for the basis of a culture, often turns to a study of ordinary people. Perhaps one of the most revealing places to find them is in a court of law. In this presentatoin of nine criminal trials of sixteenth-century Rome (1540-75), where magistrates kept verbatim records, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen paint a lively portrait of a society, one that is reminiscent of Boccaccio. These stories, however, are true. Each trial transcript is followed by an essay that interprets the beliefs, codes, everyday speech, and personal transactions of a world that is radically different from our own. The people on trial include assassins, a spell-caster, an exorcist, an adulterous wife, several courtesans, and the peasant cast of a bawdy, sacrilegious play. Out of their often pognant troubles, and their machinations, comes a vivid revelation of not only the tumultuous street life of Rome but also rituals of honour, the power and weakness of women, and the realities of social and economic hierarchies. Like cinema-verite, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome gives us an intimate glimpse of a people and their world.

From the middle of the fifteenth century a distinctively Roman Renaissance occurred. A shared outlook, a persistent set of intellectual concerns, similar cultural assumptions and a commitment to common ideological aims bound Roman humanists and artists to a uniquely Roman world, different from Florence, Venice, and other Italian and European centers.This book provides the first comprehensive portrait of the Roman Renaissance world. Charles Stinger probes the basic attitudes, the underlying values and the core convictions that Rome's intellectuals and artists experienced, lived for, and believed in from Pope Eugenius IV's reign to the Eternal City in 1443 to the sacking of 1527. He demonstrates that the Roman Renaissance was not the creation of one towering intellectual leader, or of a single identifiable group; rather, it embodied the aspirations of dozens of figures, active over an eighty-year period.Stinger illuminates the general aims and character of the Roman Renaissance. Remaining mindful of the economic, social, and political context--Rome's retarded economic growth, the papacy's increasing entanglement in Italian politics, papal preoccupation with the crusade against the Ottomans, and the effects of papal fiscal and administrative practices--Stinger nevertheless maintains that these developments recede in importance before the cultural history of the period. Only in the context of the ideological and cultural commitments of Roman humanists, artists, and architects can one fully understand the motivation for papal policies. Reality for Renaissance Romans was intricately bound up with the notion of Rome's mythic destiny.The Renaissance in Rome is cultural history at its best. It evokes the moods, myths, images, and symbols of the Eternal City, as they are manifested in the Liturgy, ceremony, festivals, oratory, art, and architecture of Renaissance Rome. Throughout, Stinger focuses on a persistent constellation of fundamental themes: the image of the city of Rome, the restoration of the Roman Church, the renewal of the Roman Empire, and the fullness of time. He describes and analyzes the content, meaning, origin, and implications of these central ideas of Roman Renaissance.This book will prove interesting to both Renaissance and Reformation scholars, as well as to general readers, who may have visited (or plan to visit) Rome and have become fascinated and affected by this extraordinary city. "There is no other book like it in any language," says Renaissance historian John O'Malley. "It presents a coherent view of Roman culture....collects and presents a vast amount of information never before housed under one roof. Anyone who teaches the Italian Renaissance," O'Malley stresses, "will have to know this book."

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.

From the tenor of contemporary discussions, it would be easy to conclude that the idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Not so, argues Gary Ferguson in Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Making use of substantial fragments of trial transcripts Gary Ferguson brings the story of a same-sex marriage to life in striking detail. He unearths an incredible amount of detail about the men, their sex lives, and how others responded to this information, which allows him to explore attitudes toward marriage, sex, and gender at the time. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution's complex and contested history.

Winner of the 2011 Bainton Prize for Reference Works A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492-1692, edited by Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, is a unique multidisciplinary study offering innovative analyses of a wide range of topics. The 30 chapters critique past and recent scholarship and identify new avenues for research.

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.

Illuminating the history of Jews and Jewish-Catholic relations in Rome, Intimate Strangers investigates the unusual and uninterrupted relationship between Jews and Catholics as it has developed from the first century CE to the present.