Florence and Beyond is a volume comprising twenty-five essays on Renaissance topics written by some of John Najemy's many students and friends to honor this important maestro. An affectionate introduction written by Peterson with Bornstein situates Najemy's work in the context of his career and of Florentine historiography. This is followed by Gene Brucker's memoir of working in the Archivio di Stato of Florence when it was situated in the Uffizi and Anthony Molho's illuminating reconstruction of Hans Baron's career crisis in the 1930s and ’40s.
A section on “Culture” begins with the evaluation by James Blythe and John La Salle of an unpublished manuscript by Baron on Ptolemy of Lucca. William Hyland discusses Camaldolese spirituality in the light of the antagonistic relations between Ambrogio Traversari and John-Jerome of Prague. Nancy Bisaha finds “discourses of power and desire” in Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's Briefwechsel with the Cardinal and Bishop of Cracow in 1453. Amy Bloch explains the back-and-forth in Lorenzo Ghiberti's relations with the Calimala Guild in Florence. The interplay between individuals and institutions in the administration of the Florentine Cathedral in the fifteenth century is described by Margaret Haines. One of the most enigmatic documents of fifteenth-century Florence, the Codex Rustici, with its many sketches of Florentine monuments that appear in the context of an account of a journey to the Holy Land is explicated as a devotional text by Saundra Weddle. Robert Black argues that Florence had a male literacy rate of close to 70 percent in an essay that anticipates a conclusion of his magnum opus on Tuscan education.
“Society” is a section that comprises six essays. Chara Armon hypothesizes a new “delight” in the language surrounding fatherhood in the mid-fifteenth century. Alison Brown traces in exquisite detail the friendship of Ser Pace di Bambello with Ser Niccolò Michelozzi over several decades at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. Julius Kirshner explores a consilium from 1440 concerning a dowry dispute at Pescia that shows that there was little legal uniformity in the Florentine territorial state, particularly in civil cases involving citzens of different towns. Edward Muir offers some fascinating reflections on the statutory exclusion of women from government — an exclusion that he shows in the case of Corneto (now called Tarquinia, in Lazio) was a kind of display that covered, and perhaps even encouraged, a political reality marked by continuous female agency. Renée Baernstein charts conceptions of masculinity in the sixteenth-century Colonna family. Alison Lewin treats perceptions of old age in contemporary descriptions and portraits of Venetian doges.
A final section on “Politics” stretches from the medieval commune to the Enlightenment. Teresa Rupp explores the failure of ideals of justice to correspond with social practice in Dino Compagni's Florence. Susannah Baxendale shows how the conspiratorial activities of a few members of the Alberti family resulted in escalating collective punishment of the entire kin group. Dale Kent reconstructs the career and outlook of Ser Alesso Pelli, an assistant of Cosimo de’ Medici, based on letters in the Medici archive. Margery Ganz carefully describes the pressures that led prominent Florentines to become “friends” (clients) of the Medici in the decades before and after 1434. Nofri Tornabuoni's work as Lorenzo de’ Medici's representative in Rome is described by Melissa Bullard as an example of the “shared agency” that typified some of Lorenzo's more successful ventures. In an illuminating essay on Paolo Vettori's Ricordi of 1512, published fifty years ago by Albertini, Mikael Hörnqvist makes a persuasive case for Machiavelli as coauthor. The alternating mix of attraction and repulsion that Machiavelli felt toward the historical figure of Hannibal is discussed with appropriate psychological depth in Robert Fredona's essay. David Peterson offers an important discussion of Machiavelli's inversion in the Florentine Histories of the traditional narrative of ecclesiastical history concerning the papacy. Albert Ascoli traces Machiavelli's use in Clizia (and elsewhere) of names and scenes from Greek and Roman history and literature in a splendid demonstration of the intertextuality of Machiavellian dramas that are traditionally treated as self-contained. Humfrey Butters makes the case for a distinct Enlightenment reading of Machiavelli that separated him from contemporary and prior Renaissance humanists, turning him into an invented ancestor of the Enlightenment philosophe.
This is a rich volume of essays and a fitting tribute to a learned and generous historian.
