This highly original book opens up the almost entirely neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, reinforced by Renaissance ideas and conditions. Of enormous importance both for European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.

This volume puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. The contributors include English, Italian, American and Australian scholars. The volume focuses on new material and addresses all stages in the judicial process from the drafting of laws to the rounding up of bandits. The articles range geographically across most of the peninsula. This is the only single-volume treatment available on the subject in English.

A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of ‘goods’ from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial ‘opening up’ of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case studies involving Florence and Rome, and drawing on unpublished archival material, Lowe documents the myriad occasions on which global knowledge became dissociated from overseas objects, animals and people. Fundamental aspects of these imperial imports, including place of origin and provenance, she shows, failed to survive the voyage and make landfall in Europe. Lowe suggests that there were compelling reasons for not knowing or caring about provenance, and concludes that geographical knowledge, like all knowledge, was often restricted and not valued. Examining such documents as ledger entries, journals and public and private correspondence as well as extant objects, and asking previously unasked questions, Lowe meticulously reconstructs the backstories of Portuguese imperial acquisitions, painstakingly supplying the context. She chronicles the phenomenon of mixed-ancestry children at Florence’s foundling hospital; the ownership of inanimate luxury goods, notably those possessed by the Medici; and the acquisition of enslaved people and animals. How and where goods were acquired, Lowe argues, was of no interest to fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italians; possession was paramount.

Analyzing convent culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the medium of three unpublished nuns' chronicles, this study examines the nuns' intellectual and imaginative achievements to determine how they preserved individual and convent identities by writing chronicles. The chronicles reveal many examples of the nuns' achievements, especially with regard to cultural creativity, and demonstrate that convent traditions ultimately determined the cultural priorities that dictated convent ceremonial life.

This invaluable collection explores the many faces of murder, and its cultural presences, across the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1650. These shape the content in different ways: the faces of homicide range from the ordinary to the sensational, from the professional to the accidental, from the domestic to the public; while the cultural presence of homicide is revealed through new studies of sculpture, paintings, and popular literature. Dealing with a range of murders, and informed by the latest criminological research on homicide, it brings together new research by an international team of specialists on a broad range of themes: different kinds of killers (by gender, occupation, and situation); different kinds of victim (by ethnicity, gender, and status); and different kinds of evidence (legal, judicial, literary, and pictorial). It will be an indispensable resource for students of Renaissance Italy, late medieval/early modern crime and violence, and homicide studies.

Marriage in the European past was a controlled social institution: parents arranged marriages, the interests of the family were put before those of the individual, and women were expected to be married. This book sets out to explore the consequences of the institution of marriage, especially for women, while also trying to suggest that it had limits. This more critical stance distinguishes this book from the few others available in English on marriage in the late medieval/early modern period, especially as regards Italy.

This book, first published in 2005, opens up the much neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the view of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to black African 'criminality'. The main purpose of the collection is to show the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants. Of enormous importance for both European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.

This book examines the life of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453–1524) from a variety of perspectives and using a range of techniques. It analyses the relationship between Machiavelli, Piero and Francesco Soderini, and reinstates the crucial role played by Rome and contacts with Rome in late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Florentine politics. Soderini’s position as one of the chief powerbrokers of papal Rome, in opposition to the Medici, enables a reappraisal of political and ecclesiastical patronage and clientele systems. The cardinal also encouraged cultural, intellectual and building activities. Overall, through the book’s collation of archival sources in and outside Italy, a new vision emerges of the lifestyle and activities of a learned and politically astute Italian cardinal.

This invaluable collection explores the many faces of murder, and its cultural presences, across the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1650. These shape the content in different ways: the faces of homicide range from the ordinary to the sensational, from the professional to the accidental, from the domestic to the public; while the cultural presence of homicide is revealed through new studies of sculpture, paintings, and popular literature. Dealing with a range of murders, and informed by the latest criminological research on homicide, it brings together new research by an international team of specialists on a broad range of themes: different kinds of killers (by gender, occupation, and situation); different kinds of victim (by ethnicity, gender, and status); and different kinds of evidence (legal, judicial, literary, and pictorial). It will be an indispensable resource for students of Renaissance Italy, late medieval/early modern crime and violence, and homicide studies.