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"Bowd, Stephen D"
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Venice's most loyal city : civic identity in Renaissance Brescia
By the second decade of the fifteenth century Venice had established an empire in Italy extending from its lagoon base to the lakes, mountains, and valleys of the northwestern part of the peninsula. The wealthiest and most populous part of this empire was the city of Brescia which, together with its surrounding territory, lay in a key frontier zone between the politically powerful Milanese and the economically important Germans. Venetian governance there involved political compromise and some sensitivity to local concerns, and Brescians forged their distinctive civic identity alongside a strong Venetian cultural presence.
Based on archival, artistic, and architectural evidence, Stephen Bowd presents an innovative microhistory of a fascinating, yet historically neglected city. He shows how Brescian loyalty to Venice was repeatedly tested by a succession of disasters: assault by Milanese forces, economic downturn, demographic collapse, and occupation by French and Spanish armies intent on dismembering the Venetian empire. In spite of all these troubles the city experienced a cultural revival and a dramatic political transformation under Venetian rule, which Bowd describes and uses to illuminate the process of state formation in one of the most powerful regions of Renaissance Italy.
eBook
Renaissance mass murder : civilians and soldiers during the Italian wars
Renaissance Mass Murder' explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. 0The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence - histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects - which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. 0On this basis, Renaissance Mass Murder reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of battle. This volume also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally,0it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.
Book
The Republics of Ideas: Venice, Florence and the Defence of Liberty, 1525-1530
The sixteenth century has often been regarded as a crucial period in the history of political events in Italy, and in the history of political ideas. The contributions of Florence and Venice to this process have long been acknowledged. Florentine admiration for the Venetian political system reflected internal political instability in the former city. The evidence for Venetian–Florentine contacts, and for a Venetian concern or admiration for Florence has been less noted. This article aims to show that there is evidence that Venetian concern for the defence of republican liberty after 1525 was allied to an awareness of Florentine political events and their significance for Venetian political practices. This awareness was stimulated by the pressure of imperial intervention on the peninsula after 1525. Florence and Venice were allies under the treaty of Cognac, and diplomats in both cities articulated a concern for republican libertas in Italy and an antipathy towards imperial rule. The work of Gasparo Contarini can be placed in this context, and as a result the critical point in the development of his arguments about Venetian political stability can be placed in the 1520s rather than in the years around 1509. The politics and political ideas of both cities were therefore developed in a wider context than has hitherto been supposed.
Journal Article
Pietro Bembo and the 'monster' of Bologna (1514)
This article examines the theme of the sacred and the profane in Renaissance Italy. It focuses on an anonymous letter of 1514 in which a 'monster' is described. The two-headed baby is interpreted by the letter-writer as a sign of divine wrath and as an allegory for the foreign policy of Pope Leo X which appeared to be swinging between France and Germany. It argues that authorship of the letter may be assigned to the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo, who was at the heart of papal government in 1514. It reassesses Bembo's spirituality in the context of the monastic preoccupations of his friends during 1500–14; Bembo's own quest for spiritual ease; and the universal nature of belief in natural signs and wonders in Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Journal Article