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In the sixteenth century, the city-state of Florence failed. In its place the Medicis created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty analyzes the slow transformations that predated and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject.
List of contents
Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: States and Status in the Florentine Renaissance 1 - Imagining Florence: The Civic World of the Late Fifteenth Century 2 - Great Expectations: The Place of the Medici in the Office-Holding Class, 1480-1527 3 - Defending Liberty: The Climacteric of Republican Florence 4 - Neither Fish nor Flesh: The Difficulty of Being Florentine, 1530- 1537 5 - Reimagining Florence: The Court Society of the Mid-Sixteenth Century Conclusion: Florence and Renaissance Republicanism Appendix 1: A Partial Reconstruction of the Office-Holding Class of Florence, ca. 1500 Appendix 2: Biographical Information Notes Acknowledgments Index
About the author
Nicholas Scott Baker is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at Macquarie University.
Summary
In the sixteenth century, the city-state of Florence failed. In its place the Medicis created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty analyzes the slow transformations that predated and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject.
Report
In a lucid and lively way, Baker has managed to reveal untold parts of what would seem to be a well-worn story. Rather than seeing a pronounced break between republic and principate in Renaissance Florence, Baker emphasizes continuity of language and images, as well as of office holders themselves, from the late fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century.
-- Sharon Strocchia, Emory University
The Fruit of Liberty provocatively reinterprets the significance of Florentine political culture in the late Renaissance. By interrogating the apparently sharp contrast between republican and ducal Florence, Baker reveals hidden continuities in the Florentine experience that help explain the triumph of post-Renaissance absolutism just as much as the persistence of republican language and traditions.
-- Mark Jurdjevic, Glendon College, York University
