The Renaissance in Italy: A Social And Cultural History Of The Rinascimento

Guido Ruggiero
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/22/2014
EAN 9780521719384, ISBN10: 0521719380

Paperback, 654 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
Language: English

This book offers a rich and exciting new way of thinking about the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a historical movement. Guido Ruggiero's work is based on archival research and new insights of social and cultural history and literary criticism, with a special emphasis on everyday culture, gender, violence and sexuality. The book offers a vibrant and relevant critical study of a period too long burdened by anachronistic and outdated ways of thinking about the past. Familiar, yet alien; pre-modern, but suggestively post-modern; attractive and troubling, this book returns the Italian Renaissance to center stage in our past and in our historical analysis.

1. Legitimacy
a crisis and a promise (c.1250–c.1340)
2. Civiltà
living and thinking the city (c.1300–c.1375)
3. Plague
death, disaster, and the rinascita of civiltà (c.1325–c.1425)
4. Violence
social conflict and the Italian Hundred Years War (c.1350–c.1454)
5. Imagination
the shared primary culture of the early Rinascimento (c.1350–c.1475)
6. Courts
princes, aristocrats, and quiet glory (c.1425–c.1500)
7. Self
the individual as a work of art (c.1425–c.1525)
8. Discovery
finding the old in the new (c.1450–c.1560)
9. Re-dreams
virtù, saving the Rinascimento, and the satyr in the garden (c.1500–c.1560)
10. Reform
spiritual enthusiasms, discipline, and a church militant (c.1500–c.1575)
11. Retreat
the great social divide and the end of the Rinascimento (c.1525–c.1575).