Customer Reviews

The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (RSART: Renaissance Society of America Reprint Text Series)

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It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you glad you weren't born 600 years ago. I brought this book as a research aid for a novel I'm writing, and I find that it is often the first book I reach for.

A lot of this book is made up of court documents which ranging from lighthearted and silly to vulgar and macabre. Other books ("Shopping in Renaissance Italy", "Renaissance Letters", Lucca Landucci's "A Florentine Diary") are also priceless, but this one wins hands down in terms of story-telling and entertainment.

This book gives a view of 14th and 15th century Florence through the eyes of its people. I only wish that there were more documentary studies of this type.

I was transfixed by this collection of stories. They cover every aspect of life in Renaissance Florence. Each of the 132 stories is a personal tale of what happened to an individual. The stories are drawn from letters, court records and diares found in "Archivio di Stato". The stories range in length from a paragraph to several pages. Some of the chapter titles give an idea of the range of these stories: "Economic fortune and social mobility", "Marriage", "Death", "Family Enmities", "The Guilds", "Patterns of violence", "The Vendetta"`"Crimes of Gravity", "Succor for the indigent", "diminished Responsibility: Insanity", "Gambling", "Prostitution", "voices of the Poor", and many many more.

A must read for anyone who has a desire for connection with the sensibilities of people from a distant time.

This is an indispensable book about the city that gave us the Renaissance. Its wealth of contemporary documents--carefully selected by Dr. Brucker from diaries, letters, legal documents, and archives--brings history vividly to life. It offers striking insight into the lives of humble but upwardly-mobile merchants, pious or hypocritical prelates, destitute laborers, Tartar slaves, abandoned women, thieves, prostitutes, heretics, and witches--in their own words.

Where else can you find actual eyewitness accounts of the rescue of a heretic from the Inquisition, by an angry mob ("Let's stone those buggering friars!"), or the actual words spoken by a heretic on his way to the stake? (The only such burning in the fifty years covered by this survey ... The Renaissance was the Rebirth of Reason, and Florentines were generally tolerant of free-thinkers.)

Students of the Renaissance owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr Brucker, for this and his other books.