This book is a study of convent theatre in Italy, an all-female tradition. Widespread in the early modern period, but virtually forgotten today, this activity produced a number of talented dramatists and works worthy of remembrance. Convent authors,…
This book relates the history of Italian railways with special regard to their relation with the Italian state from the 1840s, when the first lines were constructed, until nationalization in 1905. It shows that while the Italian state interfered con…
This book analyses the social, political and religious roles of the confraternities - the lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs - in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth ce…
This book focuses on the behavior of the ruling families of Brescia.
This was the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the long eighteenth century (1689-1815). The book covers a diverse range of artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the eightee…
This is the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the long eighteenth century (1689–1815). The book covers a diverse range of artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the ei…
This book provides the first full account of the Italian nobility in the post-unification era. It challenges recent interpretations which have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites in Italy, and the marginality of the nobility after 1861.…
This book provides a full account of the Italian nobility in the post-unification era. It challenges interpretations which have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites in Italy and the marginality of the nobility after 1861, and instead high…
Confraternities were the most common form of organized religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. They were at once the lay face of the church, the spiritual heart of civic government, and the social kin who claimed the allegiance of peers…
This book focuses on the behavior of the ruling families of Brescia, a rich and strategically vital city under Venetian rule, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The first part of the book conceptualizes the civic leadership of…
This 1994 book provides a meticulous examination of the ideology, structure, and functions of papal police as they operated in the city and province of Bologna in the period before Italian unity. In doing so, it also offers an important new perspect…
This book deals with the crucial relationship between war and state formation in early modern Europe by considering the role of the Duchy of Savoy and the rise of this hitherto weak state into one of the regular members of the anti-French coalitions…
Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. C…
In 1734 the kingdom of Naples became an independent monarchy, but in 1799 a Jacobin revolution transformed it briefly into a republic. In these few but intense decades of independence all the great problems of the age of the Enlightenment became app…
This book is a major study in English of the duchy of Savoy during the period of the Thirty Years War. Rather than examining Savoy purely in terms of its military or geo-strategic role, Dynasty and Diplomacy in the Court of Savoy comprises three int…
This book brings together for the first time detailed analyses of Tridentine liturgical reform, Counter-Reformation sanctity and the late Renaissance ‘revolution’ in historical method. It redraws traditional historical boundaries, and of…
Political exiles were a prominent feature of political life in Renaissance Italy, often a source of intense concern to the states from which they were banished, and a ready instrument for governments wishing to intervene in the affairs of their riva…
Numbers and Nationhood explores the Italian inflection of a Europe-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century: the rise of statistics as a mode of representation in society. Silvana Patriarca examines the ideologies which informed the copious statist…
The opening of the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome (the office of the 'Inquisition') yielded an extraordinary wealth of documentation, altering dramatically many long-standing views on the repressive activity of the Rom…
This 2002 book attempts to overcome the traditional historiographical approach to the role of the early modern papacy by focusing on the actual mechanisms of power in the papal court. The period covered extends from the Renaissance to the aftermath…
This volume is the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states in the early modern period. The various contributions reveal the instruments and forms of foreign relations in the Itali…
This 2000 volume was the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states in the early modern period. The various contributions reveal the instruments and forms of foreign relations in the…
Ercole d’Este (1471–1505) is perhaps best known as the father of Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua, but his court in Ferrara was one of the most glittering in Renaissance Italy. He was an extremely prolific builder and laid ou…
This book examines the life of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453–1524) from a variety of perspectives and using a range of techniques. It analyses the relationship between Machiavelli, Piero and Francesco Soderini, and reinstates the crucial r…
Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection of essays approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the Middle Ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Ge…
This is the first social and cultural study of the principal ‘free’ professions in Italy between unification and the First World War. It is a major contribution both to our understanding of the history of the bourgeoisie in Italy and to…
This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building its future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. In the seventeenth century the Mediterranean was the l…
