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  • Renaissance Florence: A Social History
  • F.W. Kent
Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Edited by Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xviii, 674. $150.00.)

This welcome collection of essays on the society and art of Renaissance Florence serves as an up-to-date and accessible introduction to much current research in the field. While it is not perhaps a "social history" of Florence as its subtitle says—at least as that term was understood by an older generation interested above all in demography and in social relations, structures, and institutions—Renaissance Florence does tackle many of the historical questions touching the relationship between art and society that emerged from that and other earlier research. The titles of the six themes into which the essays are divided give a clear sense of the book's general approach and subject matter: "The Theatre of Florence," "The Public Realm," "Relatives, Friends, and Neighbors,""Men and Women,""The Spaces of the Spiritual," and "Across Space and Time." The eighteen authors whom Roger Crum and John Paoletti have invited, after careful consideration one infers, to participate with them in this collaborative study of "the dynamics of space in a Renaissance city" (Introduction) are an interesting mixture of a few old and rather more new faces. By my count, precisely half of the twenty contributors are art historians by formal training. It is, however, the express intention of the editors, themselves [End Page 644] both art historians, that their book "not privilege either history or art history as a mode of understanding the past" (p. 13). Their collaborators certainly display a willingness (inevitably more thorough-going in some cases than in others) to ignore as increasingly irrelevant the traditional frontiers between these two historical disciplines, to the advantage of the book as a whole.

In a short review of a large collection of essays by many scholars, it is simply not possible to mention every author by name, let alone to discuss each essay's contribution. This is a pity. A number of the younger scholars present the results of important new research with admirable clarity; several of the senior contributors manage in exemplary fashion to pull together the research and reflections of a lifetime, while also suggesting how the subject they are discussing might be developed in the future. The overall quality of the essays is high, then, as one would expect of a collection that has been meticulously planned and painstakingly executed by its editors. "Space" in all of its physical and metaphorical meanings is, however, a slippery concept, as the contributors themselves make clear (in a few cases not necessarily intentionally, it must be said), and despite the efforts of the editors some of the essays, among them several of the best, deal more or less literally or even perfunctorily with the book's leitmotiv. Even allowing for the difficulty of shaping any collection of essays, and the dynamic and malleable nature of this one's subject matter, the division into six themes does not always work. Friendship and the spaces of amicizia, for example, are discussed in "Men and Women" rather than in the preceding section to which one might have thought they belonged; and anyway the theme of friendship deserved more attention in a book on the society and art of Renaissance Florence.

If the most internally coherent subdivision is perhaps that devoted to "the spaces of the spiritual," readers of this Review will also find novel and stimulating information and insights throughout this excellent book. Florentine painting, sculpture, and architecture remained above all religious art in this period; the society that produced and paid for that art saw itself as quintessentially a sacred, Catholic, one. The editors have succeeded in their ambitious intention to "provide a richly textured sense of how art was used at all levels of society" (p. 15), and they and their collaborators deserve our gratitude and thanks for their efforts.

F.W. Kent
Monash University
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