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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.
List of contents
- Part I: Introduction and Overview
- Introduction
- 1: A Brief History of the Italian Wars
- Part II: War and Mass Murder: Practices
- 2: Why Mass Murder Happened
- 3: The Experiences of Civilians
- Part III: War and Mass Murder: Theories
- 4: Civilians and Theories of War
- 5: The Machiavellian Massacre
- Part IV: War and Mass Murder: Representations
- 6: Remembering and Representing the Massacre
- 7: 'With Pain/Pen': The Poetic Massacre
- Conclusion
About the author
Stephen D. Bowd works at the University of Edinburgh and has published widely on the history of the Italian Renaissance and on culture, religion, and belief in Venice and its empire between 1400 and 1550.
Summary
This volume presents a compelling account of the prevalence of murder and violence during the Italian Renaissance. Contrary to the usual narratives of harmony and creation, Stephen Bowd outlines how massacres happened, how people justified and explained such events, and how they were culturally represented during the European renaissance.
Additional text
This is, in short, a work that offers new perspectives via the study of massacres on all manner of Renaissance sources and texts. Researchers on multiple themes will find inspiration here, whether in relation to the military revolution and the current scholarly interest in martial cultures, or when reconsidering the canonical literary works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. There is food for thought here too on issues of the nation, religion and ethnicity in early modern European warfare. It is testimony to the strength of this book that it prompts as many new questions about these wars as it answers: it should be essential reading for scholars of early modern Europe.
Report
With this book, Bowd deftly achieves his goal of "bringing the modern reader closer to the forms of consciousness and experiences of civilians and soldiers during the Italian Wars without, at the same time, wrenching them out of their time or rendering them merely pitiable"...this is a laudable, impressive contribution to the thriving field of violence in early modern Italy. Amanda Madden, Georgia Institute of Technology, Comptes Rendus
