Murder In Renaissance Italy

Author : Trevor Dean,K. J. P. Lowe
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2017-07-13
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781107136649

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Murder in Renaissance Italy by Trevor Dean,K. J. P. Lowe Pdf

This invaluable collection explores the many faces of murder, and its cultural presences, across the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1650. These shape the content in different ways: the faces of homicide range from the ordinary to the sensational, from the professional to the accidental, from the domestic to the public; while the cultural presence of homicide is revealed through new studies of sculpture, paintings, and popular literature. Dealing with a range of murders, and informed by the latest criminological research on homicide, it brings together new research by an international team of specialists on a broad range of themes: different kinds of killers (by gender, occupation, and situation); different kinds of victim (by ethnicity, gender, and status); and different kinds of evidence (legal, judicial, literary, and pictorial). It will be an indispensable resource for students of Renaissance Italy, late medieval/early modern crime and violence, and homicide studies.

Author : Thomas V. Cohen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2010-01-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226112602

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Love and Death in Renaissance Italy by Thomas V. Cohen Pdf

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.

Author : Stephen D. Bowd
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2018-11-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780192568786

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Renaissance Mass Murder by Stephen D. Bowd Pdf

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence - histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects - which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis, Renaissance Mass Murder reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of battle. This volume also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

Author : Colin Rose
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2019-10-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108498067

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A Renaissance of Violence by Colin Rose Pdf

This in-depth analysis of homicide patterns in seventeenth-century Italy explores the social contexts behind a sharp rise in interpersonal violence.

Author : Sarah Bradford
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2005-10-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780141909493

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Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford Pdf

Lucrezia Borgia - an infamous murderess or simply the victim of bad press? Lucrezia Borgia's name has echoed through history as a byword for evil - a poisoner who committed incest with her natural father, Pope Alexander VI, and with her brother, Cesare Borgia. Long considered the most ruthless of Italian Renaissance noblewomen, her tarnished reputation has prevailed long since her own lifetime. In this definitive biography, a work of huge scholarship and erudition, Sarah Bradford gives a fascinating account of Lucrezia's life in all its colourful controversy. Daughter, sister, wife and mother, Lucrezia Borgia was surrounded by wealth, privilege and intrigue. But what was the truth behind her extraordinary existence - was she a monster of cruelty and deceit, or simply the pawn of her power-hungry father and brother?

Author : Trevor Dean,K. J. P. Lowe
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1994-04-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521411028

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Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy by Trevor Dean,K. J. P. Lowe Pdf

Drawing on a wide body of internationally-renowned scholars, including a core of Italians, this volume focuses on new material and puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. All stages of the judicial process are addressed, from the drafting of new laws to the rounding-up of bandits. Attention is paid both to common crime and to more historically specific crimes, such as sumptuary laws. Attempts to prevent or suppress disorder in private and public life are analysed, and many different types of crime, from the sexual to the political and from the verbal to the physical, are considered. In sum the volume aims to demonstrate the fundamental importance of crime and disorder for the study of the Italian Renaissance. It is the only single-volume treatment available of the subject in English. Other books have studied crime in a single city, or single types of crime, but few have presented a cross-section of articles which deploy diverse methodological approaches in material from many parts of the peninsula.

Author : Eleanor Herman
Publisher : Crux Publishing Ltd
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2018-05-14
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781909979659

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Murder in the Garden of God by Eleanor Herman Pdf

Author : Anthony F. D'Elia
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674061811

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A Sudden Terror by Anthony F. D'Elia Pdf

In 1468, on the final night of Carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat enthroned above the boisterous crowd, when a scuffle caught his eye. His guards had intercepted a mysterious stranger trying urgently to convey a warningÑconspirators were lying in wait to slay the pontiff. Twenty humanist intellectuals were quickly arrested, tortured on the rack, and imprisoned in separate cells in the damp dungeon of Castel Sant'Angelo. Anthony D'Elia offers a compelling, surprising story that reveals a Renaissance world that witnessed the rebirth of interest in the classics, a thriving homoerotic culture, the clash of Christian and pagan values, the contest between republicanism and a papal monarchy, and tensions separating Christian Europeans and Muslim Turks. Using newly discovered sources, he shows why the pope targeted the humanists, who were seen as dangerously pagan in their Epicurean morals and their Platonic beliefs about the soul and insurrectionist in their support of a more democratic Church. Their fascination with Sultan Mehmed II connected them to the Ottoman Turks, enemies of Christendom, and the love of the classical world tied them to recent rebellious attempts to replace papal rule with a republic harking back to the glorious days of Roman antiquity. From the cosmetic-wearing, parrot-loving pontiff to the Turkish sultan, savage in war but obsessed with Italian culture, D'Elia brings to life a Renaissance world full of pageantry, mayhem, and conspiracy and offers a fresh interpretation of humanism as a dynamic communal movement.

Author : Paul Strathern
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2015-08-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781605988276

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Death in Florence by Paul Strathern Pdf

By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo de' Medici they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances. In Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury, Savonarola's sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred medieval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events—invasions, trials by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths—featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.In an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts, and political compromises that made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.

Author : Caroline P. Murphy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2008-04-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198042907

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Murder of a Medici Princess by Caroline P. Murphy Pdf

In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany. Murphy is a superb storyteller, and her fast-paced narrative captures the intrigue, the scandal, the romantic affairs, and the violence that were commonplace in the Florentine court. She brings to life an extraordinary woman, fluent in five languages, a free-spirited patron of the arts, a daredevil, a practical joker, and a passionate lover. Isabella, in fact, conducted numerous affairs, including a ten-year relationship with the cousin of her violent and possessive husband. Her permissive lifestyle, however, came to an end upon the death of her father, who was succeeded by her disapproving older brother Francesco. Considering Isabella's ways to be licentious and a disgrace upon the family, he permitted her increasingly enraged husband to murder her in a remote Medici villa. To tell this dramatic story, Murphy draws on a vast trove of newly discovered and unpublished documents, ranging from Isabella's own letters, to the loose-tongued dispatches of ambassadors to Florence, to contemporary descriptions of the opulent parties and balls, salons and hunts in which Isabella and her associates participated. Murphy resurrects the exciting atmosphere of Renaissance Florence, weaving Isabella's beloved city into her story, evoking the intellectual and artistic community that thrived during her time. Palaces and gardens in the city become places of creativity and intrigue, sites of seduction, and grounds for betrayal. Here then is a narrative of compelling and epic proportions, magnificent and alluring, decadent and ultimately tragic.

Author : Douglas Preston
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2008-06-10
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 9780446537414

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The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston Pdf

In the nonfiction tradition of John Berendt and Erik Larson, the author of the #1 NYT bestseller The Lost City of the Monkey God presents a gripping account of crime and punishment in the lush hills surrounding Florence as he seeks to uncover one of the most infamous figures in Italian history. In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more. This is the true story of their search for--and identification of--the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's thrillers, The Monster of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide-and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.

Author : John Follain
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-30
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1250019389

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A Death in Italy by John Follain Pdf

Recounts the highly publicized trial of Amanda Knox, drawing on interviews and complete case files to assess the true story and media sensation surrounding the 2007 murder of her roommate and the arrests of Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.

Author : Lorenzino De' Medici
Publisher : Alma Books
Page : 52 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2019-03-07
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780714549477

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Apology for a Murder by Lorenzino De' Medici Pdf

Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, but also for writing accomplished literary works, including a comedy and several poems, Lorenzino de' Medici remains one of the most enigmatic figures of Italian literature. In his masterpiece, Apology for a Murder, he reveals the inner motives behind his act, portraying himself as a hero to be numbered alongside the great tyrannicides of ancient Rome and Greece.Lorenzino himself, in 1548, was murdered by two soldiers hired either by the emperor Charles V or by Cosimo, Alessandro's successor as Duke, and this volume includes the dramatic account of his killing by Francesco Bibboni, one of the assassins, as well as a selection of Lorenzino's poems, giving a fully rounded image of the antihero of Alfred de Musset's Lorenzaccio.

Author : Niccolo Capponi
Publisher : Melville House
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2015-11-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9781612194615

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The Day the Renaissance Was Saved by Niccolo Capponi Pdf

It was a battle that change the course of history, and was immortalized in a massive painting by Leonardo da Vinci that was thought lost for centuries . . . until now. On a sweltering day in June 1440, near the Tuscan town of Anghiari, the simmering conflict among Italy’s principal powers exploded into a battle whereby Florence and the papal States joined with Venice to defeat the previously unstoppable army of Milan. The shocking denoument would open the way for the flowering of Florentine culture, and the birth of what we now know as the Renaissance. There was, perhaps, no stunning evidence of this than a massive painting by Leonardo da Vinci commemorating the Battle of Anghiari, a masterpiece that quickly became famous—but then was mysteriously lost. Until recently, that is, when researchers made a breathtaking discovery of the location where it has been hidden for more than four hundred years. In The Day the Renaissance Was Saved, Niccolò Capponi—a direct descendent of Niccolò Machiavelli, as well as of a Florentine general who was a key strategist of the campaign at Anghiari—weaves the story of da Vinci’s lost masterpiece through the narrative of the history-changing battle, and offers context on the development of humanist thought and the political intrigues of fifteenth-century Italy. Complete with maps and twenty-four color images, this is military history, political history, and art history all rolled into one, from a scholar whose ancestors were key players in the scheming, plotting, and fighting that led to this pivotal moment in Western history. From the Hardcover edition.

Author : Marcello Simonetta
Publisher : Doubleday
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2008-06-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780385526807

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The Montefeltro Conspiracy by Marcello Simonetta Pdf

A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved. The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi Conspiracy. More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place. In The Montefeltro Conspiracy, Simonetta unravels this plot, showing not only how the plot came together but how its failure (only one of the Medici brothers, Giuliano, was killed; Lorenzo survived) changed the course of Italian and papal history for generations. In the course of his gripping narrative, we encounter the period’s most colorful characters, relive its tumultuous politics, and discover that two famous paintings, including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding revenge.