Renaissance History, Art and Culture
About the Book Series
This series investigates the Renaissance as a complex intersection of political and cultural processes that radiated across Italian territories into wider worlds of influence, not only throughout Europe, but into the Middle East, parts of Asia and the Indian subcontinent. It will be alive to the best writing of a transnational and comparative nature and will cross canonical chronological divides of the Central Middle Ages, the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.
The series intends to spark new ideas and encourage debate on the meanings, extent and influence of the Renaissance within the broader European world. It encourages engagement by scholars across disciplines -- history, literature, art history, musicology, and possibly the social sciences -- and focuses on ideas and collective mentalities as social, political, and cultural movements that shaped a changing world from ca 1250 to 1650.
Network and Migration in Early Renaissance Florence, 1378-1433: Friends of Friends in the Kingdom of Hungary
1st Edition
By Katalin Prajda
January 09, 2026
This book explores the co-development of political, social, economic, and artistic networks of Florentines in the Kingdom of Hungary during the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg. Analyzing the social network of these politicians, merchants, artisans, royal officers, dignitaries of the Church, and ...
Cleopatra in Italian and English Renaissance Drama
1st Edition
By Anna Maria Montanari
December 01, 2025
This book considers some of the main adaptations of the character of Cleopatra for the Renaissance stage, travelling from Italy to England to arrive finally to Shakespeare. It shows how each reading of the story of Cleopatra is unique to and expressive of the culture which produced it, even as ...
Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy
1st Edition
Edited
By Fabrizio Ricciardelli, Andrea Zorzi
December 01, 2025
Emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectation and moral beliefs. Hate, fear, cruelty and love are always turning history into the history of passion and lust, because emotional life is always ready to overflow intellectual life. This fascinating study of emotion in Renaissance Italy ...
Italian Courts and European Culture
1st Edition
By Marcello Fantoni
December 01, 2025
Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, princely courts dominated the Italian political scene. These courts were effervescent centers of cultural production. As such, they became a model for European monarchies who imported Italian courtly forma del vivere (‘style of life’) to legitimize ...
Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches in Early Modern Europe
1st Edition
By Michaela Valente
December 01, 2025
This book deals with a fascinating and original claim in 16th-century Europe. Witches should be cured, not executed. It was the physician and scholar Johann Wier (1515-1588) who challenged the dominant idea. For his defense of witches, more than three centuries later, Sigmund Freud chose to put ...
Masaniello: The Life and Afterlife of a Neapolitan Revolutionary
1st Edition
By Silvana D'Alessio
December 01, 2025
This is a translation and new edition of Masaniello. La sua vita e il mito in Europa (Rome, 2007), the first historical biography of the leader of the revolt that broke out in Naples in 1647–48. Initially, its main objectives were the cancellation of the many taxes introduced in previous decades ...
Pope Paul III and the Cultural Politics of Reform: 1534-1549
1st Edition
By Bryan Cussen
December 01, 2025
When Paul III was elected in 1534, hopes arose across Christendom that this pope would at last reform and reunite the Church. During his fifteen-year reign, though, Paul's engagement with reform was complex and contentious. A work of cultural history, this book explores how cultural narratives of ...
Renaissance Masculinities, Diplomacy, and Cultural Transfer: Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga in Italy and Beyond
1st Edition
By Jessica O'Leary
December 01, 2025
Federico and Ferrante Gonzaga came of age during a time of intense change in sixteenth-century Italy: The Italian Wars (1494–1559). The first and third-born sons of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga spent their formative years at the courts of Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain, where, ...
Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram, John Gagné
December 01, 2025
Who were the shadow agents of Renaissance war? In this pioneering collection of essays scholars use new archival evidence and other sources, including literature, artworks, and other non-textual material, to uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by means of their ...
Transregional Lordship and the Italian Renaissance: René de Challant, 1504-1565
1st Edition
By Matthew Vester
December 01, 2025
René de Challant, whose holdings ranged from northwestern Italy to the Alps and over the mountains into what is today western Switzerland and eastern France, was an Italian and transregional dynast. The spatially dispersed kind of lordship that he practiced and his lifetime of service to the house ...
Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice
1st Edition
Edited
By Humfrey Butters, Gabriele Neher
December 01, 2025
Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice brings together a group of prominent contributors to consider the topics of government and warfare in Tuscany and Venice in the Renaissance. The essays cover a remarkably broad geographical and topical range as they ...
The Uncertain World of Renaissance Geneva and Savoy: Political Life, Factional Conflicts and Religious Turmoil
1st Edition
By Mathieu Caesar
May 13, 2025
Uncertainty and instability affected Geneva and the Duchy of Savoy since the mid-fifteenth century. French and Swiss expansionism had turned Savoy into part of a long geopolitical fault line, running from the North Sea to the Mediterranean along the border between France and the Empire. In Geneva, ...