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List of contents
Part One: Late Medieval Commerce and Scholarship
Chapter One: Letters, Networks and Reputation among Francesco di Marco Datini and his Correspondents
Jeffrey Miner
Chapter Two: Ciriaco of Ancona and the Limits of the Mediterranean Network
Monique O’Connell
Part Two: Rulers and Subjects
Chapter Three :Saving Naples: The King’s Malaria, the Barons’ Threat, and Ippolita Maria Sforza’s Letters
Diana Robin and Lynn Lara Westwater
Chapter Four: Isabella d'Este's Employee Relations
Deanna Shemek
Chapter Five: Letters as Sources for Studying Jewish Conversion: The Case of Salomone da Sesso/Ercole de' Fedeli
Tamar Herzig
Part Three: Humanism, Diplomacy, and Empire
Chapter Six: Writing a Letter in 1507: The Fortunes of Francesco Vettori’s Correspondence and the Florentine Republic
Christopher Bacich
Chapter Seven: Minding Gaps: Connecting the Worlds of Erasmus and Machiavelli
William J. Connell
Chapter Eight: The Cardinal’s Dearest Son and the Pirate: Venetian Empire and the Letters of Giovan Matteo Bembo
Demetrius Loufas
Part Four: Science and Travel
Chapter Nine: The Literary Lives of Health Workers in Late Renaissance Venice
Sarah Gwyneth Ross
Chapter Ten: A Florentine Humanist in India: Filippo Sassetti, Medici Agent by Annual Letter
Brian Brege
Chapter Eleven: ‘La verità delle stelle’: Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo
Meredith K. Ray
Part Five: Information, Politics, and War
Chapter Twelve: Publishing the Baroque Post: The Postal Itinerary and the Mailbag Novel
Rachel Midura
Chapter Thirteen: War, Mobility, and Letters at the Start of the Thirty Years War, 1621-23
Suzanne Sutherland
Chapter Fourteen: Making sense of the news: Micanzio’s letters, Cavendish, Bacon, and the Thirty Years War
Filippo De Vivo
Epilogue: Lives Full of Letters: From Renaissance to Republic of Letters
Suzanne Sutherland
About the author
Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University, USA. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994) and many other publications on Renaissance / early modern Italy and the history of science. Professor Findlen is the 2016 recipient of the Premio Galileo for her contributions to understanding Italian culture.
Suzanne Sutherland is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. She is finishing a book on early modern military entrepreneurs and has worked on Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters interdisciplinary digital humanities project since 2008.
Summary
In this edited volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars examines the Renaissance of letter-writing in the Italian peninsula, from the late medieval re-emergence of letter-writing through the mid-seventeenth century.
