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This volume examines, among others, the emotional language of the court, around public execution, religious practices and during outbreaks of disease.
The first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on a vast range of contemporary documents, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents of popular protest and their patterns in comparative perspectives.
Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.
In both exile and execution, society must be complicit; people must be willing to ostracize their neighbors or watch their execution, participating in the spectacle that reifies the power of the state. This collection investigates the relationship between the exiled and the landscape, physical or psychological, into which they are (dis)placed in conversation with accounts of execution, constructed by the authorities or invented to criticize the whole system. The essays cover a broad range of material including early Irish penitential literature, French courtly epics, English legendary histories, Spanish textual evidence of executions, and legal treatises governing both exile and execution in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Contributors are Gillian Adler, Gila Aloni, Kim Bergqvist, Karen Casey Casebier, Westley Follett, Radosław Kotecki, Mireille J. Pardon, Ben Parsons, Bojana Radovanović, Abel de Lorenzo Rodríguez, Susan Small, and Larissa Tracy.
Richard Kaeuper’s career has examined three salient concerns of medieval society - knightly prowess and violence, lay and religious piety, and public order and government - most directly in three of his monographs: War, Justice, and Public Order (Oxford, 1988), Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), and Holy Warriors (Penn, 2009). Kaeuper approaches historical questions with an eye towards illuminating the inherent complexities in human ideas and ideals, and he has worked to untangle the various threads holding together cultural constructs such as chivalry, licit violence, and lay piety. The present festschrift in his honor brings together scholars from across disciplines to engage with those same concerns in medieval society from a variety of perspectives. Contributors are: Bernard S. Bachrach, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Samuel A. Claussen, David Crouch, Thomas Devaney, Paul Dingman, Daniel P. Franke, Richard Firth Green, Christopher Guyol, John D. Hosler, William Chester Jordan, Craig M. Nakashian, W. Mark Ormrod, Russell A. Peck, Anthony J. Pollard, Michael Prestwich, Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Leah Shopkow, and Peter W. Sposato.
A History of Siena provides a concise and up-to-date biography of the city, from its ancient and medieval development up to the present day, and makes Siena’s history, culture, and traditions accessible to anyone studying or visiting the city. Well informed by archival research and recent scholarship on medieval Siena and the Italian city-states, this book places Siena’s development in its larger context, both temporally and geographically. In the process, this book offers new interpretations of Siena’s artistic, political, and economic development, highlighting in particular the role of pilgrimage, banking, and class conflict. The second half of the book provides an important analysis of the historical development of Siena’s nobility, its unique system of neighborhood associations (contrade) and the race of the Palio, as well as an overview of the rise and fall of Siena’s troubled bank, the Monte dei Paschi. This book is accessible to undergraduates and tourists, while also offering plenty of new insights for graduate students and scholars of all periods of Sienese history.
From the 11th century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the late 13th century, when the regimes of individual “tyrants” took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government. The authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material, both documentary and literary, to portray the world of the republican regimes, focusing on the public spirit and factional strife that was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seedbeds of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance.
The history of the Greek community of early modern Venice in transition from immigrants and refugees to permanent residents.
Pre-modern European history is replete with moments of encounter. At the end of arduous sea and land journeys, and en route, Europeans met people who challenged their assumptions and certainties about the world. Some sought riches, others allies; some looked for Christian converts and some aimed for conquest. Others experienced the forced cultural encounter of exile. Many travelled only in imagination, forming ideas which have become foundational to modern mentalities: race, ethnicity, nation, and the nature of humanity. The consequences were profound: both productive and destructive. At the beginning of the third millennium CE we occupy a world shaped by those centuries of travel and encoun...