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Author: M. E. Bratchel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-09-04
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0199542902
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first scholarly study covering the history of both the city and the region of Lucca, from classical antiquity to the end of the fifteenth century
Author: M. E. Bratchel
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2008-09-04
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0191562289
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Although there are many books in English on the city and state of Lucca, this is the first scholarly study to cover the history of the entire region from classical antiquity to the end of the fifteenth century. At one level, it is an archive-based study of a highly distinctive political community; at another, it is designed as a contribution to current discussions on power-structures, the history of the state, and the differences between city-states and the new territorial states that were emerging in Italy by the fourteenth century. There is a rare consensus among historians on the characteristic features of the Italian city-state: essentially the centralization of economic, political, and juridical power on a single city and in a single ruling class. Thus defined, Lucca retained the image of an old-fashioned, old-style city-republic right through until the loss of political independence in 1799. No consensus exists with regard to the defining qualities of the Renaissance state. Was it centralized or de-centralized; intrusive or non-interventionist? The new regional states were all these things. And the comparison with Lucca is complicated and nuanced as a result. Lucca ruled over a relatively large city territory, in part a legacy from classical antiquity. Lucca was distinctive in the pervasive power exercised over its territory (largely a legacy of the region's political history in the early and central middle ages). In consequence, the Lucchese state showed a marked continuity in its political organization, and precociousness in its administrative structures. The qualifications relate to practicalities and resources. The coercive powers and bureaucratic aspirations of any medieval state were distinctly limited, whilst Lucca's capacity for independent action was increasingly circumscribed by the proximity (and territorial enclaves) of more powerful and predatory neighbours.
Author: Thomas W. Blomquist
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Studies of late medieval Tuscany have traditionally relied on historiographical premises derived from the experience of its intensely investigated capital city. Specifically, normative and quantitative data from Florentine sources have been employed to chart demographic, social, and economic trends during the communal age and across the period of the Black Death and its aftermath. The results have invited instructive comparisons with other regions of Italy, as well as other parts of Europe. At the same time, however, the focus on Florence in its role as a metropolitan center belies the conceptual problems inherent in the modern definition of region, applicable only with hindsight to medieval juridical and topographical boundaries. The essays in this volume offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony. While they cover a range of topics, they all provide evidence of the important resources available to scholars working in provincial Tuscan archives and the volume offers an excellent sampling of the state of scholarship on these Italian communities.
Author: John Arnold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 0198768788
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What does it mean--and what might it yet come to mean--to write "history" in the twenty-first century? History After Hobsbawm brings together leading historians from across the globe to ask what being an historian should mean in their particular fields of study. Taking their cue from one of the previous century's greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, and his interests across many periods and places, the essays approach their subjects with an underlying sense of what role an historian might seek to play, and attempt to help twenty-first-century society understand "how we got here" They present new work in their sub-fields but also point to how their specialisms are developing, how they might further grow in the future, and how different areas of focus might speak to the larger challenges of history--both for the discipline itself and for its relationship to other fields of academic inquiry. Like Hobsbawn, the authors in this collection know that history matters. They speak to both the past and the present and, in so doing, introduce some of the most exciting new lines of research in a broad array of subjects from the medieval period to the present.
Author: John F. Padgett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-10-14
Total Pages: 607
ISBN-13: 0691148872
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. In the short run, they argue, actors make relations, but in the long run, they argue, actors make actors. Organizational novelty arises from spillover across intertwined networks, which tips reproducing biographical and production flows. This theory is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of careful and original historical case studies, ranging from early capitalism and state formation, to the transformation of communism, to the emergence of contemporary biotechnology and Silicon Vally. -- from back cover.
Author: Benjamin David Brand
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 019935135X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Holy Treasure and Sacred Song explores the complex interplay between relic cults and the liturgy in medieval Tuscany. Drawing on documentary, literary and visual evidence rarely considered together, it reveals that liturgical texts, music, and ritual were integral to the clergy's well-informed promotion of saints buried in their churches.
Author: Chris Wickham
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-11-06
Total Pages: 530
ISBN-13: 0191507970
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Medieval Rome analyses the history of the city of Rome between 900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. This volume doesn't merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church standpoint; instead, it engages in studies of the city's processions, material culture, legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of society, and the articulation between the city's regions. This new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome's political history in the era of the 'reform papacy', one of the greatest crises in Rome's history, which had a resonance across the entire continent. Medieval Rome is the most systematic analysis ever made of two and a half centuries of Rome's history, one which saw centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period of reconstruction which followed.
Author: G. Geltner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-02
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0812251350
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community's infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city's hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills. Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people's greater health.
Author: Daniel Lord Smail
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-06-06
Total Pages: 351
ISBN-13: 0674737288
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →As a Europe grew rich in the Middle Ages, the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of households often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers kept goods in circulation, and sergeants of the law marched into debtors’ homes to seize belongings equal in value to debts owed. David Smail describes a material world on the cusp of modern capitalism.
