Volume 28, Number 21 & 22 · January 21, 1982
The Medici Megalopolis
By Felix Gilbert
Public Life in Renaissance Florence
by Richard C. Trexler
Academic Press, 591 pp., $45.00
The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence
by Samuel Kline Cohn Jr
Academic Press, 296 pp., $55.00
The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History
by Richard A. Goldthwaite
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 459 pp., $27.50
Few ages have stimulated so much interest—and so much aroused the admiration of later generations—as the sixty years of Medicean hegemony in fifteenth-century Florence. Medicean Florence has been described and evoked in a vast literature of novels and plays, historical popularizations, and serious works of historical scholarship. Among historical scholars have been well-known, even great, names: Reumont and Ranke, Perrens, Sismondi, and Villari. Their writings have been translated into many languages and their interpretations have found their way into guidebooks and textbooks, popular histories, and popular biographies. The work on the task of reconstructing Medicean Florence seems to have no end; the scholarly study of Florentine history goes on and even intensifies. But in recent years a striking change has taken place. Historical scholarship of the Medicean period has been moving away from the interests of the general reader.
Review, 5957 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |