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Informationen zum Autor Virginia Cox is Honorary Professor of Early Modern Italian Literature and Culture and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of The Prodigious Muse: Women's Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (2011), Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650 (2008) and The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (2008). Joanne Paul is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on the history of political thought of the Renaissance and early modern periods. Her publications include Thomas More (2016) and Queenship and counsel in the Early Modern world (2017, edited with Helen Matheson-Pollock). Eugenio Biagini is Professor of History at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, UK. A historian of liberalism and democracy, he has written on British, Irish and Italian history since 1789. His publications include British Democracy and Irish nationalism 1876-1906 (2007), The Shaping of Modern Ireland (2016, edited with Daniel Mulhall), Currents of Radicalism. Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 , (1991, edited with A. J. Reid), and Citizenship and Community. Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865-1931 , (1996). Klappentext This volume offers a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the Renaissance. The Renaissance has rarely been considered an important moment in the history of democracy. Nonetheless, as this volume shows, this period may be seen as a "democratic laboratory" in many, often unexpected, ways. The classicizing cultural movement known as humanism, which spread throughout Europe and beyond in this period, had the effect of vastly enhancing knowledge of the classical democratic and republican traditions. Greek history and philosophy, including the story of Athenian democracy, became fully known in the West for the first time in the postclassical world. Partly as a result of this, the period from 1400 to 1650 witnessed rich and historically important debates on some of the enduring political issues at the heart of democratic culture: issues of sovereignty, of liberty, of citizenship, of the common good, of the place of religion in government. At the same time, the introduction of printing, and the emergence of a flourishing, proto-journalistic news culture, laid the basis for something that recognizably anticipates the modern "public sphere." The expansion of transnational and transcontinental exchange, in what has been called the "age of encounters," gave a new urgency to discussions of religious and ethnic diversity. Gender, too, was a matter of intense debate in this period, as was, specifically, the question of women's relation to political agency and power. This volume explores these developments in ten chapters devoted to the notions of sovereignty, liberty, and the "common good"; the relation of state and household; religion and political obligation; gender and citizenship; ethnicity, diversity, and nationalism; democratic crises and civil resistance; international relations; and the development of news culture. It makes a pressing case for a fresh understanding of modern democracy's deep roots. Vorwort A wide-ranging overview of the cultural history of democracy in the Renaissance. Zusammenfassung This volume offers a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the Renaissance. The Renaissance has rarely been considered an important moment in the history of democracy. Nonetheless, as this volume shows, this period may be seen as a “democratic laboratory” in many, often unexpected, ways. The classicizing cultural movement known as humanism, which spread throughout Europe and beyond in this period, ha...
