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

This volume collects twenty-five essays of various authors to recognize the scholarship of John Najemy, author of A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford, 2006). While the editors sum up Najemy’s themes and thesis, Anthony Molho outlines with new documents (pp. 61–90) the uneven academic career of Hans Baron prior to his very influential The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955). Between the last product of the old German Geistesgeschichte and the new American sociological synthesis we can recognize the core of the historical problems discussed in the volume. The editors summarize such methodical issues in this way: “demography and economics, religion and Church history,” in conjunction with new approaches, such as “gender and relation of the sexes, the history of the private life, ritual and public behaviour, and patronage (cultural, social and political; private, corporate and public)” (p. 19).

However, this scope is perhaps too ambitious. To begin with, the essays on specific political subjects seem among the weakest ones of the collection. Whether the subject is “Alberti Kinship and Conspiracy” at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, according to Susannah F. Baxendale (pp. 339–53), or the “Medici’s inner circle,” according to Margery A. Ganz (pp. 369–82), the historical problem is presented as a pure matter of individuals and family networks, abstracting from political and institutional frameworks as well as a broader historical continuity. For example, we observe the Ricci, the Alberti, and finally the Medici succeeding each other in the common enmity against the Albizzi and the old Archguelph party through the period spanned now by Gene Brucker’s two books: this fact cannot be explained only through parental or other kinds of anthropological ties. The massive research by Nicolai Rubinstein into the Florentine institutions of the Medici regime, which deserve further developments and debates, has been, if not forgotten, surely put aside. Furthermore, as the brilliant essay of Julius Kirshner shows (pp. 257–70), the analysis of legal documents, both statutory and of Roman law, can disclose unexpected aspects relevant not only for social history, but for political projects as well.

On religious and ecclesiastical history are James M. Blythe and John La Salle’s essay on Ptolomy of Lucca (pp. 93–106), William Hyland’s essay on “Late Medieval Camaldolese Spirituality” (pp. 107–20), and Nancy Bisaha’s essay on the letters between Enea Silvio Piccolomini and the Polish bishop Zbigniew Olesniski on the Christian conception of poetry (pp. 121–34).The confidential epistolary exchanges between the patron and his trustees reveal much: the letters between Cosimo de’ Medici and ser Alesso Pelli, his main appointee in patronage of charitable undertakings, analyzed by Dale Kent (pp. 355–67); the letters between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Nofri Tornabuoni on the Medici Bank’s affairs in the Roman Curia, discussed by Melissa Meriam Bullard (pp. 383–98); and the letters of ser Pace di Bambello, a chancery functionary and a close friend of Niccolò Michelozzi, the most distinguished among Lorenzo’s secretaries, which are covered by Alison Brown (pp. 229–55). These letters disclose some secret projects of Lorenzo in his last years. Beside the control Lorenzo exercised through ser Niccolò and ser Pace himself on old Florentine institutions such as the Arte della Lana and the Parte Guelfa, and his lifelong participation in the Opera del Duomo, he planned to elevate the cathedral’s chapter by adding enlightened canons (p. 243). Moreover, it is also noteworthy that ser Pace at the time of Lorenzo’s funerals referred to the love shown by the populace “to this holy house” (p. 244).This expression is found later, in 1517, in the title affixed by Giovanni di Strada detto lo Stradino, a servant...