Milan was for centuries the most important center of economic, ecclesiastical and political power in Lombardy. As the State of Milan it extended in the Renaissance over a large part of northern and central Italy and numbered over thirty cities with their territories. A Companion to Late Medieval and early Modern Milan examines the story of the city and State from the establishment of the duchy under the Viscontis in 1395 through to the 150 years of Spanish rule and down to its final absorption into Austrian Lombardy in 1704. It opens up to a wide readership a well-documented synthesis which is both fully informative and reflects current debate. 20 chapters by qualified and distinguished scholars offer a new and original perspective with themes ranging from society to politics, music to literature, the history of art to law, the church to the economy. Contributors are: Giuliana Albini, Giancarlo Andenna, Jane Black, Stefano D’Amico, Alessandra Dattero, Massimo Della Misericordia, Giuliano Di Bacco, Claudia Di Filippo, Federico Del Tredici, Andrea Gamberini, Christine Getz, T.J. Kuehn, Germano Maifreda, Patrizia Mainoni, Alessandro Morandotti, Simona Mori, Serena Romano, Giovanna Tonelli, Massimo Zaggia.

After the State and the Church, the most well organized membership system of medieval and early modern Europe was the confraternity. In cities, towns, and villages it would have been difficult for someone not to be a member of a confraternity, the recipient of its charity, or aware of its presence in the community. In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, Konrad Eisenbichler brings together an international group of scholars to examine confraternities from various perspectives: their origins and development, their devotional practices, their charitable activities, and their contributions to literature, music, and art. The result is a picture of confraternities as important venues for the acquisition of spiritual riches, material wealth, and social capital. Contributors to this volume: Alyssa Abraham, Davide Adamoli, Christopher F. Black, Dominika Burdzy, David D’Andrea, Konrad Eisenbichler, Anna Esposito, Federica Francesconi, Marina Gazzini, Jonathan Glixon, Colm Lennon, William R. Levin, Murdo J. MacLeod, Nerida Newbigin, Dylan Reid, Gervase Rosser, Nicholas Terpstra, Paul Trio, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Beata Wojciechowska, and Danilo Zardin.

Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City offers the first sustained comparative examination of the relationship between confraternal life and the spaces of the late medieval and early modern city. By considering cities large (Rome) and small (Aalst) in regions as disparate as Ireland and Mexico, the essays collected here seek to uncover the commonalities and differences in confraternal practice as they played out on the urban stage. From the candlelit oratory to the bustling piazza, from the hospital ward to the festal table, from the processional route to the execution grounds, late medieval and early modern cities, this interdisciplinary book contends, were made up of fluid and contested ‘confraternal spaces.’ Contributors are: Kira Maye Albinsky, Meryl Bailey, Cormac Begadon, Caroline Blondeau-Morizot, Danielle Carrabino, Andrew Chen, Ellen Decraene, Laura Dierksmeier, Ellen Alexandra Dooley, Douglas N. Dow, Anu Mänd, Rebekah Perry, Pamela A.V. Stewart, Arie van Steensel, and Barbara Wisch.

Juxtaposing and interlacing similarities and differences across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions, the collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease.

The book investigates the lives and careers of the Procaccini brothers: Camillo (1561–1629), Carlo Antonio (1571–1631) and Giulio Cesare (1574–1625), the most important family of painters working in northern Italy at the start of the seventeenth century. The Procaccinis' work is here analysed by interconnecting their individual stories and understanding their success as the combination of mutual artistic choices, a high level of specialization and precise business organization. The book looks at this family of painters as entrepreneurs, emphasizing their conscious response to the requests of public and private patrons, as well as their ability to balance instances of originality and imitation in an era characterized by a wide range of artistic opportunities, including religious commissions, national and international patronage and multifaceted markets. This book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, early modern studies, the art market, Italian studies and Italian history.

Space matters. It situates our history, structures our daily lives, and often determines what we can and cannot do. Borders are central to this reality. Tools and symbols of separation, power, and identity, they bring people together as much as they set them apart. This book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity. It shows that pre-modern borders were nothing like the fuzzy lines they are typically made out to be, that border-making was rarely a top-down process and should instead be studied as an interactive endeavour, and that space was shaped by communities far more than states in this period. At its core, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy is the account of a frontier which would mark the Italian peninsula for centuries, that between the territories of the Duchy of Milan and those of the Republic of Venice. But it is also a study of how rulers and subjects alike defined spaces they could call their own. Luca Zenobi combines methods from several disciplines and applies them to a range of evidence from twenty different libraries and archives, including theoretical treatises and pragmatic records, written chronicles and cartographic visualisations, private documents and official correspondence. The cast of characters is equally eclectic, featuring influential thinkers and pragmatic statesmen, zealous factions and clumsy bureaucrats, hopeless beggars and ambitious princes. On the border, their stories intersect and reveal their part in a shared history.

Italians became fascinated by the New World in the early modern period. While Atlantic World scholarship has traditionally tended to focus on the acts of conquest and the politics of colonialism, these essays consider the reception of ideas, images and goods from the Americas in the non-colonial states of Italy. Italians began to venerate images of the Peruvian Virgin of Copacabana, plant tomatoes, potatoes, and maize, and publish costume books showcasing the clothing of the kings and queens of Florida, revealing the powerful hold that the Americas had on the Italian imagination. By considering a variety of cases illuminating the presence of the Americas in Italy, this volume demonstrates how early modern Italian culture developed as much from multicultural contact - with Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and the Caribbean - as it did from the rediscovery of classical antiquity.

A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars. In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion. John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost. Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena introduces the once-powerful commune to a wider audience. Edited by Santa Casciani and Heather Richardson Hayton, this collection explores how Siena built a distinctive civic identity and institutions that endured for centuries.

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume II is devoted to 'Cultures and Power', opening with chapters on philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections examine 'Europe beyond Europe', with the transformation of contact with other continents during the first global age, and military and political developments, notably the expansion of state power.