Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy (review)

This wide-ranging collection of twenty-five essays celebrates Najemy's career in Florentine and Italian Renaissance history. Co-editors Peterson and Bornstein outline Najemy's scholarly insights and interventions in a biobibliographical introduction that highlights his mastery of the Florentine archives; his close reading of texts influenced by his engagement with critical theory; and his grand overview of the cultural, social, and political history of Florence. The other chapters pay homage to Najemy's articles and books that extend Florentine history back to the thirteenth century commune; analyze the genre of epistolary exchange; explicate Niccolò Machiavelli's thought; and provide a multidimensional, magisterial synthesis of Florentine history from 1200 to 1575.

Two "orientation" chapters honor the Florentine historiographical tradition. In a personal memoir, Gene Brucker recalls the studiosi and riches in the old sala di studio of "The Uffizi Archives, 1952–1987." Anthony Molho presents new archival documentation about the loss of Hans Baron's German position in 1933 to the genesis of his thesis on civic humanism in 1942, in order to trace the changes in conceptions of Baron's project to the idea of "crisis."

Seven chapters on culture follow Baron's unpublished study, discussing how Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca) inserted civic humanist ideas into Thomas Aquinas' treatise about kingship ( James Blythe and John La Salle); the debate about late medieval Camaldolese spirituality between Ambrogio Traversari and John-Jerome of Prague (William Hyland); Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's discussion of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, especially the letters exchanged with the bishop of Krakow (Nancy Bisaha); artists and corporate patronage—Lorenzo Ghiberti and the Arte di Calimala (Amy Bloch), and supervisors, artists, projects, and the governing board of Florence's cathedral (Margaret Haines); the Codex Rustici on Florence's religious devotion to the Holy Sepulchre (Saundra Weddle); and signatures in the 1427 Catasto to confirm Florence's male literacy rate at 69.3 percent (Robert Black).

Six chapters on society explore issues and writings that involve gender and politics: fathers and sons (Chara Armon); the letters of Lorenzo de' Medici's private secretary on the Medici household (Alison Brown); a dowry dispute about a surviving husband's citizenship ( Julius Kirshner); how the exclusion of women from the public sphere made them objects of exchange between patrilines in order to cement community trust (Edward Muir); Colonna family masculinities in the court society of papal Rome (Renée Baernstein); and the unimportance of age among the Venetian Doges (Alison Williams Lewin).

Ten chapters examining politics—five of them about networks and the other five about Machiavelli—conclude the volume: institutions vs. individuals in the analysis of virtue and corruption in civic life from Dino Compagni's Chronicle and the Ordinances of Justice (Teresa Pugh Rupp); Alberti kinship and conspiracy to reveal the dynamics of individual and family relationships (Susannah Baxendale); the letters of Cosimo de' Medici's personal assistant on Cosimo's household (Dale Kent); Cosimo and four friends in his inner circle (Margery Ganz); language and metaphor in Nofri Tornabuoni's letters about "shared agency" among the many participants in Lorenzo de' Medici's networks (Melissa Bullard); Machiavelli as a co-author of Paolo Vettori's 1512 Ricordi (Micael Hörnquist); Hannibal in Machiavelli's thought (Robert Fredona); Machiavelli and the Petrine succession (David Peterson); history and literature as rhetoric in Machiavelli's Clizia (Albert Russell Ascoli); and the relationship between humanism, political theory, and the origins of the social sciences from the age of Machiavelli to the Enlightenment (Humfrey Butters).

The sparkling essays in this festschrift are a fitting tribute to the breadth and depth of Najemy's scholarly contributions in their modeling of his empirical grounding, innovative methodological inspiration, nuanced textual readings, and panoramic interdisciplinary perspective. From late medieval theological texts to family letters, from artists and patrons to individuals and institutions...