Roman Tales: A Reader's Guide to the Art of Microhistory explores both the social and cultural life of Renaissance Rome and the mind-set and methods of microhistory. This book draws the reader deep into eight stories: a Christian-Jewish picnic plus an ill-aimed stone fight, an embassy-driven attack on Rome's police, a magic prophetic mirror, an immured mad hermit, a stolen dwarf, and the bizarre misadventures of a stolen roll of velvet, a truly odd elopement, and a thieving child who treats his cronies to dinner at the inn. It meditates on the resources and lacunae that shape the telling of these stories and, through them, it models an historical method that contrives to turn the limits of our knowledge into an advantage by writing honestly and movingly, to bring a dead past back to life, exemplifying and stretching the genre of microhistory. It also discusses strategies for teaching through intensive use of old documents, with a particular focus on criminal tribunal papers. Engagingly written, Roman Tales outlines the main principles of microhistorical research and draws the reader outwards towards a wider exploration and discovery of sixteenth-century Rome. It is ideal for researchers of microhistory, and of medieval and early modern Italy.

The Revolt of Snowballs unpicks a rare and turbulent event which occurred in 1511 and investigates the meaning behind it. On January 27, 1511, the island of Murano was the scene of an exceptional event during which the representative of Venice, exercising power in the island on behalf of the Serenissima, was hunted by the inhabitants under a shower of snowballs and the sound of a hostile clamour. This book uses microhistory techniques to examine the trial records of the incident and explores the lives of the Murano's inhabitants at its heart. The book begins by providing a detailed introduction to life in Murano during the sixteenth century, including its political framework and the relationship it shared with Venice. Against this context, the political skills of Murano's inhabitants are considered and key questions regarding political action are posed, including why and how people chose to protest, what sense of justice drove their actions, and what form those actions took. The latter half of the book charts the events that followed the revolt of snowballs, including the inquest and its impact on Murano's society. By putting Murano under the microscope, The Revolt of Snowballs provides a window into the cultural and political world of early modern Italy, and is essential reading for historians of revolt and microhistory more broadly.

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. Brings the Italian Renaissance to contemporary readers. Demonstrates in-depth research in content that includes archival sources Includes images to visually support the chapters and bring the text to life Presents reader-friendly prose that is both clear and highly polished

In early modern Europe, justice was always the key to public order and the state's main pillar. The pope, though the head of the church, was also a prince like any other, but his justice, as machinery and moral model, displayed the double nature of his rule, targeting not only actions but also beliefs and consciences. Irene Fosi, the doyenne of scholars of papal justice, lays out the ambitious, complex, and sometimes baffled endeavors of the pope's magistrates and through lively anecdotes gives the flavor of the encounter between the pope's assorted magistrates, inquisitors, and others, and the men and women hauled before the law. Originally published in Italian and widely acclaimed, Papal Justice has been translated into English by Thomas V. Cohen, professor of history at York University. With the English edition, this lively overview of the papal justice system reaches a transatlantic readership and makes available the fruit of Fosi's decades-long research in unpublished archives in Rome and the Vatican. The book examines the very motley shape of the pope's territorial domain, the institutions found there, and the relationships between Rome and its outlying cities. Microhistories of how things worked form a clear picture of relations between the sovereign and his subjects. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Irene Fosi is professor of modern history at the University "G. d'Annunzio," Chieti-Pescara in Italy. The Italian edition of this book, La giustizia del papa: Sudditi e tribunal nello Stato pontificio in eta moderna, was published in 2007 by Laterza. Fosi has published two other books and numerous articles. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "Irene Fosi is a seasoned scholar of Renaissance and Baroque Rome with over a quarter century of experience in papal judicial archives. Her book is a well-devised study of the courts and cases of Rome and the Papal State. The extended quotations from sources afford the reader a real taste of the interests and thinking of papal officials, Roman nobles, and local figures of all ranks. The translation is simple, elegant, and faithful to the original."--Thomas Kuehn, Professor of History, Clemson University "Fosi is unquestionably the foremost authority in any language on the early modern papacy with an unrivaled range of experience working in different kinds of judicial sources. Fosi has a wonderful ear for the voices of exasperated administrators or desperate petitioners, and her quotations bring them alive. Equally important, her judgments can be trusted. She depicts papal justice in a fully rounded fashion."--Laurie Nussdorfer, Professor of History and Letters, Wesleyan University "This book is the perfect combination of in-depth archival knowledge coupled with decades of historical experiences and the precision of the English language in an eloquent and accurate translation."--Renaissance and Reformation

Roman Tales: A Reader's Guide to the Art of Microhistory explores both the social and cultural life of Renaissance Rome and the mind-set and methods of microhistory. This book draws the reader deep into eight stories: a Christian-Jewish picnic plus an ill-aimed stone fight, an embassy-driven attack on Rome's police, a magic prophetic mirror, an immured mad hermit, a stolen dwarf, and the bizarre misadventures of a stolen roll of velvet, a truly odd elopement, and a thieving child who treats his cronies to dinner at the inn. It meditates on the resources and lacunae that shape the telling of these stories and, through them, it models an historical method that contrives to turn the limits of our knowledge into an advantage by writing honestly and movingly, to bring a dead past back to life, exemplifying and stretching the genre of microhistory. It also discusses strategies for teaching through intensive use of old documents, with a particular focus on criminal tribunal papers. Engagingly written, Roman Tales outlines the main principles of microhistorical research and draws the reader outwards towards a wider exploration and discovery of sixteenth-century Rome. It is ideal for researchers of microhistory, and of medieval and early modern Italy.

The Revolt of Snowballs unpicks a rare and turbulent event which occurred in 1511 and investigates the meaning behind it. On January 27, 1511, the island of Murano was the scene of an exceptional event during which the representative of Venice, exercising power in the island on behalf of the Serenissima, was hunted by the inhabitants under a shower of snowballs and the sound of a hostile clamour. This book uses microhistory techniques to examine the trial records of the incident and explores the lives of the Murano's inhabitants at its heart. The book begins by providing a detailed introduction to life in Murano during the sixteenth century, including its political framework and the relationship it shared with Venice. Against this context, the political skills of Murano's inhabitants are considered and key questions regarding political action are posed, including why and how people chose to protest, what sense of justice drove their actions, and what form those actions took. The latter half of the book charts the events that followed the revolt of snowballs, including the inquest and its impact on Murano's society. By putting Murano under the microscope, The Revolt of Snowballs provides a window into the cultural and political world of early modern Italy, and is essential reading for historians of revolt and microhistory more broadly.

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. As dramatic and as moving as the television show The Borgias, and a lot more true to life, 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.

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 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.