A comprehensive exploration of Machiavelli's life and thought – covering everything from his preoccupation with truth, fortune, and power, to his frequently bawdy poetry, love affairs, and friendships.Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Machiavelli really believed – and why he matters so much today.Who was Niccolo Machiavelli and why should we consider him relevant to the problems and vexations of the modern world? Ste...

Who were the shadow agents of Renaissance war? In this pioneering collection of essays scholars use new archival evidence and other sources, including literature, artworks, and other non-textual material, to uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by means of their preparatory, auxiliary, infrastructural, or supplementary labour. These shadow agents worked in the zone between visibility and invisibility, often moving between civilians and soldiers, and their ...

This collection of essays on centuries of culture and politics is "likely to become a landmark in Venetian historiography" ( The Historical Journal).Venice Reconsidered offers a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchic...

"A fresh look into how communes in the mid-12th century successfully prepared Italian power structures for the cultural significance they would later have." — Publishers WeeklyAmid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New World takes a bold new look at how these autonom...

Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome is an investigation of Renaissance diplomacy in practice. Presenting the first book-length study of this subject for sixty years, Catherine Fletcher substantially enhances our understanding of the envoy's role during this pivotal period for the development of diplomacy. Uniting rich but hitherto unexploited archival sources with recent insights from social and cultural history, Fletcher argues for the centrality of the papal court - and the city of Rome - in t...

Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice's Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean.Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice's Mediterranean empire by exam...

Building on important issues highlighted by the late Philip Jones, this volume explores key aspects of the city state in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy, particularly the nature and quality of different types of government. It focuses on the apparently antithetical but often similar governmental forms represented by the republics and despotisms of the period. Beginning with a reprint of Jones's original 1965 article, the volume then provides twenty new essays that re-examine the issues...

This volume offers the first comprehensive survey of regime change in Italy in the period c.1494–c.1559.Far from being a purely modern phenomenon, regime change was a common feature of life in Renaissance Italy – no more so than during the Italian Wars (1494–1559). During those turbulent years, governments rose and fell with dizzying regularity. Some changes of regime were peaceful; others were more violent. But whenever a new reggimento took power, old social tensions were laid ba...

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance,...

From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650.In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history...

New York Times bestselling author Ross King's biography Machiavelli is "a convincing portrait of one of the most misunderstood thinkers of all time."*The author of The Prince—his controversial handbook on power, which is one of the most influential books ever written—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was no prince himself. Born to an established middle-class family, Machiavelli worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence a...

Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyses the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. This fluent new translation is accompanied by comprehensive notes and an introduction that dispels some of the myths associated with Machiavelli, and considers the true purpose of The Prince. - ;'A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought...but war, its institu...