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"Aristocracy (Social class) Italy Rome."
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Urban space and aristocratic power late antique Rome : AD 270-535
\"Between 270 and 535 AD the city of Rome experienced dramatic changes. The once glorious imperial capital was transformed into the much humbler centre of western Christendom in a process that redefined its political importance, size, and identity. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome examines these transformations by focusing on the city's powerful elite, the senatorial aristocracy, and exploring their involvement in a process of urban change that would mark the end of the ancient world and the birth of the Middle Ages in the eyes of contemporaries and modern scholars. It argues that the late antique history of Rome cannot be described as merely a product of decline; instead, it was a product of the dynamic social and cultural forces that made the city relevant at a time of unprecedented historical changes. Combining the city's unique literary, epigraphic, and archaeological record, the volume offers a detailed examination of aspects of city life as diverse as its administration, public building, rituals, housing, and religious life to show how the late Roman aristocracy gave a new shape and meaning to urban space, identifying itself with the largest city in the Mediterranean world to an extent unparalleled since the end of the Republican period.\"--Back cover.
Book
Baronial Patronage of Music in Early Modern Rome
iThis is the first dedicated study of the musical patronage of a Roman baronial family in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patronage - the support of a person or institution and their work by a patron - in Renaissance society was the basis of a complex network of familial and political relationships between clients and patrons, whose ideas, values, and norms of behavior were shared with the collective. Bringing to light new archival documentation, this book examines the intricate network of patronage interrelationships in Rome. Unlike other Italian cities where political control was monocentric and exercised by single rulers, sources of patronage in Rome comprised a multiplicity of courts and potential patrons, which included the pope, high prelates, nobles, and foreign diplomats. Morucci uses archival records, and the correspondence of the Orsini and Colonna families in particular, to investigate the local activity and circulation of musicians and the cultivation of music within the broader civic network of Roman aristocratic families during the period. The author also shows that the familial union of the Medici and Orsini families established a bidirectional network for artistic exchange outside of the Eternal City, and that the Orsini-Colonna circle represented a musical bridge between Naples, Rome, and Florence.
eBook
The Pope's Daughter
The illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II, Felice della Rovere became one of the most powerful and accomplished women of the Italian Renaissance. Now, Caroline Murphy vividly captures the untold story of a rare woman who moved with confidence through a world of popes and princes.
eBook
Patrons and adversaries : nobles and villagers in Italian politics, 1640-1760
The early modern Roman countryside was a site of contestation between great aristocratic families and an expanding papal political regime. Rarely has the role of the inhabitants of this landscape--the villagers--been considered as part of that power struggle. As Caroline Castiglione shows in this compelling revisionist work, one Roman aristocratic family, the Barberini, was not squeezed out of governing by the extension of the papal bureaucracy, but rather became increasingly engaged with it during the long eighteenth century. Through their participation in the rural commune, villagers in an extensive territory belonging to the Barberini became active participants in the governing of the countryside. Villagers cultivated and exploited interference from the aristocratic family and the papal government, but they also kept urban elites at bay, defending their rights through the strategies of adversarial literacy. Such literate practices drew on village mastery of local constitutions, debates in the village assembly, and brilliant use of the legal system of the papacy to thwart the designs of the Barberini. Later villagers created and interpreted sources for themselves, effectively challenging the elite monopoly on making and interpreting texts. A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and exasperated bureaucrats emerges here in an engaging narrative that chronicles how seemingly marginalized villagers challenged the pragmatic control of the Roman countryside, using texts and ideas that urban elites had exported to the countryside for other purposes.
eBook
Agrarian change in late antiquity : gold, labour, and aristocratic dominance
The economy of the late antique Mediterranean is still largely seen through the prism of Weber's influential essay of 1896. Rejecting that orthodoxy, this book argues that the late empire saw substantial economic and social change, propelled by the powerful stimulus of a stable gold coinage that circulated widely. In successive chapters Dr Banaji adduces fresh evidence for the prosperity of the late Roman countryside, the expanding circulation of gold, the restructuring of agrarian elites, and the extensive use of paid labour, above all in the period spanning the fifth to seventh centuries. The papyrological evidence is scrutinised in detail to show that a key development entailed the rise of a new aristocracy whose estates were immune to the devastating fragmentation of partible inheritance, extensively irrigated, and responsive to market opportunities.The study offers a new perspective on the still largely contested issues of the use and control of labour, arguing that the East Mediterranean saw a considerable expansion of wage employment. A concluding chapter defines the more general issue raised by the aristocracy's involvement in the monetary and business economy of the period. Exploiting a wide range of sources, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity weaves together different strands of historiography (Weber, Mickwitz, papyrology, agrarian history) into a fascinating interpretation that challenges the minimalist orthodoxies about late antiquity and the ancient economy.
eBook
The Patrician
The history of the Roman Republic from the 6th cent to the 1st cent BC is the history of patrician fam's. The final instance of patrician rule is noted to be the English aristocracy of the last half of the 19th cent. The salient attributes of the patrician are: (1) He receives his identity from his lineage which includes descendents of a patrilineal line bound by kinship rights & obligation. In Rome, he belonged to The Cornellii, Fabii, Claudii; in Florence to the Bardi, Rossi or Machiavelli; in England to the Cecils, Churchills, Devonshires. The history of their republics, cities, & empires is more a history of lineage than of great individuals. (2) He holds public office with such frequency across generations of his lineage that custom, religion, & law came to sanctify his claim to public authority. (3) He is Uc. The patrician is a member of a lineage which has possessed high rank for at least 2 generations, on each of the hierarchies of authority, class, & status. Modified AA.
Journal Article
\It Shall Be So\: Grammatical Usage as Political Intent in \Coriolanus\
Throughout \"Coriolanus\", the third person \"shall\" appears primarily as a modal auxiliary: combined with another verb, it indicates the speaker's mood or attitude toward the person or thing that (s)he speaks about. This essay looks at one of the tribunes' use of \"shall\" in the third person and how it reveals the tribunes' intent to deny Coriolanus's consulship and make themselves the political power in Rome. (Contains 10 notes.)
Journal Article
The Contradiction of Domination and Production in Bureaucracy: The Contribution of Organizational Efficiency to the Decline of the Roman Empire
One of the contributions of Max Weber is his distinction between formal and substantive rationality. When viewed in relation to his theory of bureaucracy this distinction provides a context for clarifying the domination aspects from the productive activities of organization. The case study of Roman bureaucracy is used to illustrate how the contradictions between two coexisting forms of rationality--one reflecting the control of persons and resources and the other the production (and distribution) of goods and services--contributed to the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire.
Journal Article