Emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectation and moral beliefs. Hate, fear, cruelty and love are always turning history into the history of passion and lust, because emotional life is always ready to overflow intellectual life. This fascinating study of emotion in Renaissance Italy shows that emotions are built and created by the society in which they are expressed and conditioned. The contributors examine, among others, the emotional language of the court, around public execution, religious practices and during outbreaks of disease.

Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Comprising a handful of formerly independent city-states and numerous smaller communities in the plains and mountains, the Florentine 'empire' in Tuscany supplied the markets and fiscal coffers of the Renaissance republic, while providing lessons in statecraft that nourished the political thought of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. This volume comprises seventeen original essays representing the new directions being taken by historians of the Florentine Renaissance. It offers new and exemplary approaches towards state-building, political vocabulary, political economy, civic humanism, local history and social patronage in what is one of the most interesting and well-documented of the states of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.

This volume gathers together seventeen original essays that represent the new directions being taken by historians of the Florentine Renaissance. Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These essays offer new and exemplary approaches toward state-building, political vocabulary, political economy, civic humanism, local history and social patronage.