This book offers a rich and exciting new way of thinking about the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a historical movement. Guido Ruggiero's work is based on archival research and new insights of social and cultural history and literary criticism, with a special emphasis on everyday culture, gender, violence, and sexuality. The book offers a vibrant and relevant critical study of a period too long burdened by anachronistic and outdated ways of thinking about the past. Familiar, yet alien; pre-modern, but suggestively post-modern; attractive and troubling, this book returns the Italian Renaissance to center stage in our past and in our historical analysis.
Introduction: The End of the World and Its Rebirth (Rinascita) as the Rinascimento
Chapter 1. Legitimacy: A Crisis and a Promise (c. 1250–c. 1340)
Chapter 2. Civiltà: Living and Thinking the City (c. 1300–c. 1375)
Chapter 3. Plague: Death, Disaster, and the Rinascita of Civiltà (c. 1325–c. 1425)
Chapter 4. Violence: Social Conflict and the Italian Hundred Years’ War (c. 1350–1454)
Chapter 5. Imagination: The Shared Primary Culture of the Early Rinascimento (c. 1350–c. 1475)
Chapter 6. Courts: Princes, Aristocrats, and Quiet Glory (c. 1425–c. 1500)
Chapter 7. Self: The Individual as a Work of Art (c. 1425–c. 1525)
Chapter 8. Discovery: Finding the Old in the New (c. 1450–c. 1560)
Chapter 9. Re-Dreams: Virtù, Saving the Rinascimento, and the Satyr in the Garden (c. 1500–c. 1560)
Chapter 10. Reform: Spiritual Enthusiasms, Discipline, and a Church Militant (c. 1500–c. 1575)
Chapter 11. Retreat: The Great Social Divide and the End of the Rinascimento (c. 1525–c. 1575)
Epilogue: The Diaspora of the Rinascimento
Bibliography: A Short List of Works Used