Customer Reviews

Giovanni and Lusanna : Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence

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For anyone who enjoys history, and especially Italian Renaissance history, this is a gem! This book is an examination of marriage as a legal institution and the prescribed roles of both men and women in it. By examining two actual persons involved in a legal case about the validity of their marriage, Lusanna and Giovanni, Brucker allows the reader a rare glimpse into a more personal type of history- a microhistory, that tries to show the greater mores and norms of Renaissance Florence through the interpretation of a legal case. Although not an easy read, and why should it be, this is an excellent introduction to anyone interested in more detailed historical analysis of law and social institutions in the Renissance.

In 1455, in Florence, Lusanna di Benedetto, a widow of the artisanal class, brought suit against the noble, Giovanni della Casa, attempting to prove that he had secretly married her, and that, therefore, his publicly celebrated marriage to another was bigamous.

Professor Brucker has taken the simple records of this lawsuit and has used them as the framework for a short, but information-packed, account of Florentine society in the 14th-century. This story of a woman who challenged class and hierarchy in order to protect her reputation and prove the legitimacy of her marriage has a great deal to teach us about the legal process of the time, the interplay and tension between civil and church authority, the relationship between social classes, gender norms, and, of course, marriage laws and customs. This book shows Brucker as not only a scholar, but a story-teller, one who can turn the dry papers of the law courts into a fascinating human narrative. In particular, he brings Lusanna and Giovanni to life. We can almost feel what they felt, and understand how their upbringing, social positions and expectations brought them, first, together, and then into conflict. I was, frankly, surprised to find how much I had learned from a book of slightly over 100 pages!

As one who believes that one of the great disadvantages of closed stacks and internet search engines is the minimized opportunity for digression and serendipitous finds, I was delighted to read that this book was the result of Professor Brucker's fascination with a story that he came across while doing research into another matter at the Florentine State Archives. Indeed, he temporarily abandoned that research to concentrate on this story. A man after my own heart!

This book is very interesting. It definitely was not what I expected it to be but I found the story to be so entrancing that I couldn't put the book down until I was completely done reading it!

Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence is an account of lovers maintaining social status despite going against certain social expectations. It is a historically significant tale because of the exceptionally detailed documents pertaining to their troubles; these documents describe the norms of the Florentine society throughout the renaissance and show in what ways Giovanni and Lusanna are rebels in their time. Giovanni courted Lusanna whilst she was wed to another, and when she became widowed Giovanni supposedly married her in a small ceremony but later denied the rite, resulting in a legal battle. By providing an exception to the social mores the testimonies of witnesses, along with official documents of a case where Lusanna protested the marriage of her alleged husband to a second woman provide the basis for studying the societal norms of renaissance Florence. Since "the relationship between Giovanni and Lusanna bridged two different milieux; its denouement in the archiepiscopal court provides a rare and revealing glimpse of social structures and values in Medicean Florence."(94) The in-depth witness testimonies not only tell the stories of this particular relationship but also reveal how society functioned then.

I had to read this book for one of my college history classes and it was just a really tedious process. Even though the book is really short, it took me about 3 days to read it. This book is not a novel. It is not a fictional story. It is a true story that discusses the validity of Giovanni and Lusanna's so called marriage. The entire book is about Lusanna's story, then Giovanni's story. Naturally, each other's statements contradict each other. This whole book is like reading a legal transcript from a court house. The author himself, writes as if he were a witness in the court house as this whole case is broiling. This book is not one bit interesting and as soon as I am finished with my term paper, I'm running back to the book store to return it and getting my money back.