The Italian City Republics

The Italian City Republics PDF Author: Daniel Philip Waley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317864476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean illustrate how, from the eleventh century onwards, many dozens of Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth 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. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material (both documentary and literary) to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seed-bed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. In this fourth edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s treatment of religion, women, housing, architecture and art, to take account of recent trends in the abundant historiography of these topics. A new selection of illuminating images has been included, and the bibliography brought up to date. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

The Italian City Republics

The Italian City Republics PDF Author: Daniel Philip Waley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317864476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book

Book Description
Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean illustrate how, from the eleventh century onwards, many dozens of Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth 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. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material (both documentary and literary) to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seed-bed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. In this fourth edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s treatment of religion, women, housing, architecture and art, to take account of recent trends in the abundant historiography of these topics. A new selection of illuminating images has been included, and the bibliography brought up to date. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

The Italian City-State

The Italian City-State PDF Author: Philip Jones
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191590304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Book Description
Italy in the Middle Ages was unique among the countries of Europe in recreating, in a changed environment, the urban civilization of antiquity - the society, culture, and political formations of city-states. This book examines the origins and nature of this phenomenon from the fall of Rome to the eve of its consummation, the Italian Renaissance. The explanation is sought in Italy's singular `double existence' between two contrasted worlds - ancient and medieval. The ancient was characterised by the total predominance of the landed aristocracy in economy and society, enforced through a peculiar system of city states embracing town and country. The new medieval influences were marked by the separation of town, country and aristocracy, by the identification of towns with trade and a mercantile bourgeoisie, and by commercial and proto-industrial revolution. Italy shared in both worlds. It remained a land of cities and of an urbanized ruling class (except in the Norman South) and re-established territorial city states; but the staes were very different from those of antiquity, the city leaders in the commercial revolution, and Italy itself seen as a nation of shopkeepers, birthplace of capitalism. In this fascinating and ground-breaking study, Philip Jones traces in detail the tension and interaction between the two traditions, civic and patrician, mercantile and bourgeois, through all phases of Italian life to their culmination in two rival regimes of communes and despots.

The City-State in Europe, 1000-1600

The City-State in Europe, 1000-1600 PDF Author: Tom Scott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199274606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In this, the first comprehensive study of city-states in medieval Europe, Tom Scott analyzes reasons for cities' aquisitions of territory and how they were governed. He argues that city-states did not wither after 1500, but survived by transformation and adaption.

Power and Imagination

Power and Imagination PDF Author: Lauro Martines
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780801836435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In Power and Imagination, a noted historian rethinks the evolution of the city-state in Renaissance Italy and recasts the conventional distinction between "society" and "culture." Martines traces the growth of commerce and the evolution of governments; he describes the attitudes, pleasures, and rituals of the ruling elite; and he seeks to understand the period's towering works of the imagination in literature, painting, city planning, and philosophy-not simply as the creations of individual artists, but as the forman expression of the ambitions and egos of those in power.

Power And Imagination

Power And Imagination PDF Author: Lauro Martines
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307830934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 611

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Book Description
The great Italian city-states: Venice, Florence, Milan, and the others. The particular nature of their history and culture through the five centuries of their emergence, magnificent flowering, and twilight is brilliantly explored in terms of the internal shifts of economic, social, and political power—by violence, by manipulation, by the gradual pressures of changing circumstance. And here are the life and culture and works of imagination that were created as the merchants and guilds wrested dominion from the ancient nobility, from the first struggles against the Holy Roman Empire in the twelfth century through the rich cultural blaze and political exhaustion of the sixteenth. Lauro Martines, Professor of History at UCLA, has drawn together and chronicled in a single fluent narrative all the explosive energies, the social strife, the civil disorder, the political violence, the economic transformations, the crises of control, the religious fervor and corruption, and the spectacular achievements of art and intellect that made and defined the city-states.

Citizens without Nations

Citizens without Nations PDF Author: Maarten Prak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107504158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Citizenship is at the heart of our contemporary world but it is a particular vision of national citizenship forged in the French Revolution. In Citizens without Nations, Maarten Prak recovers the much longer tradition of urban citizenship across the medieval and early modern world. Ranging from Europe and the American colonies to China and the Middle East, he reveals how the role of 'ordinary people' in urban politics has been systematically underestimated and how civic institutions such as neighbourhood associations, craft guilds, confraternities and civic militias helped shape local and state politics. By destroying this local form of citizenship, the French Revolution initially made Europe less, rather than more democratic. Understanding citizenship's longer-term history allows us to change the way we conceive of its future, rethink what it is that makes some societies more successful than others, and whether there are fundamental differences between European and non-European societies.

The Future of Democracy

The Future of Democracy PDF Author: Ronald M. Glassman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030161110
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This book focuses on the processes that help stabilize democracy. It provides a socio-historical analysis of the future prospects of democracy. The link between advanced capitalism and democracy is emphasized, focusing on contract law and the separation of the economy from the state. The book also emphasizes the positive effects of the scientific world view on legal- rational authority. Aristotle’s theory of the majority middle class and its stabilizing effect on democracy is highlighted. This book describes the face to face democracies of the past in order to give us a better perspective on the high tech democracies of the future, making it appealing to students and academics in the political and social sciences.

Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy PDF Author: John E. Law
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351950355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Building on important issues highlighted by the late Philip Jones, this volume explores key aspects of the city state in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy, particularly the nature and quality of different types of government. It focuses on the apparently antithetical but often similar governmental forms represented by the republics and despotisms of the period. Beginning with a reprint of Jones's original 1965 article, the volume then provides twenty new essays that re-examine the issues he raised in light of modern scholarship. Taking a broad chronological and geographic approach, the collection offers a timely re-evaluation of a question of perennial interest to urban and political historians, as well as those with an interest in medieval and Renaissance Italy.

The Italian City-Republics

The Italian City-Republics PDF Author: Trevor Dean
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000630161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Now in its fifth edition, The Italian City Republics illustrates how, from the eleventh century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth 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. In this new edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s treatment of women and gender, the early history of the communes and the lives of non-élites. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material, both documentary and literary, to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seedbed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. The Bibliography has been updated to a list of Further Reading with the latest scholarship for students to continue their studies. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

The Italian City-state

The Italian City-state PDF Author: Philip James Jones
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781383011272
Category : City-states
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Italy in the Middle Ages was unique among the countries of Europe in recreating the urban civilization of antiquity - the society, culture, & political formation of city-states. This book examines the origins & nature of this phenomenon.