Volume 33, Number 15 · October 9, 1986
The Other Florence
By Felix Gilbert
Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427
by David Herlihy, by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Yale University Press, 404 pp., $32.00
Giovanna and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
by Gene Brucker
University of California Press, 138 pp., $13.95
Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence
by Katharine Park
Princeton University Press, 298 pp., $40.00
Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence
by Ann G. Carmichael
Cambridge University Press, 180 pp., $29.95
Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance
by Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.
Cornell University Press, 243 pp., $39.50
In the indexes of these books we cannot find the name of Pico della Mirandola; Marsilio Ficino's name appears only twice, not as the translator of Plato, but as a medical expert. Thus we hear nothing about the intellectual passions of Medicean Florence—about the enthusiasm for the writings and the monuments of the ancients, about the impact of Platonic philosophy on art and literature. All these books announce themselves as books on Renaissance Florence, but one is tempted to say that they are books on Florence without the Renaissance.
Review, 3296 words
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