Siena, Florence and Padua were all major centres for the flowering of early Italian Renaissance art and civic culture. The three communities shared a common concern for the embelishment of their cities by means of painting, sculpture and architecture. The eleven papers in this volume re-examine and re-assess the artistic legacy of the three cities during the 14th century amd locate the various works of art considered within their broader cultural, social and religious contexts. Contributors include: D Norman (Patrons, politics and art) ; C Harrison (Giotto and the `rise of painting') ; C King (The arts of carving and casting) ; T Benton (The building trades and design methods) ; D Norman (Art and religion after the Black Death) ; C King (The trecento: New ideas, new evidence) .

Siena, Florence and Padua were all major centres for the flowering of early Italian Renaissance art and civic culture. The three communities shared a common concern for the embelishment of their cities by means of painting, sculpture and architecture. The eleven papers in this volume re-examine and re-assess the artistic legacy of the three cities during the 14th century amd locate the various works of art considered within their broader cultural, social and religious contexts. Contributors include: D Norman (Patrons, politics and art) ; C Harrison (Giotto and the `rise of painting') ; C King (The arts of carving and casting) ; T Benton (The building trades and design methods) ; D Norman (Art and religion after the Black Death) ; C King (The trecento: New ideas, new evidence) .

The eleven papers in this volume present a series of case studies of major works of art either produced in Sien, Florence or Padua or executed by artists associated with the three cities. Contributors include: T Benton (The three cities compared: Urbanism) ; C Cunningham (The design of town halls) ; D Norman (Duccio's `Maestà') ; C Harrison (The Arena Chapel: Patronage and authorship) ; C King (Effigies: Human and Divine) ; T Benton (The design of Siena and Florence Duomos) ; D Norman (The paintings of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena) ; D Norman (Change and continuity in Marian altarpieces) ; C King (Women as patrons: Nuns, widows and rulers) . These two volumes together form the basis of an Open University undergraduate course in art history.

In this history of Florence, distinguished historian John Najemy discusses all the major developments in Florentine history from 1200 to 1575. Captures Florence's transformation from a medieval commune into an aristocratic republic, territorial state, and monarchy Weaves together intellectual, cultural, social, economic, religious, and political developments Academically rigorous yet accessible and appealing to the general reader Likely to become the standard work on Renaissance Florence for years to come

This book proposes an integrated and interdisciplinary approach recording and interpreting the human experience of illness, disability, care, and medical intervention. In our age of deeply technologically-driven medicine, it is crucial to re-establish and promote the neglected relationship between medicine and the arts. This textbook contains contributions by scholars in various fields, who offer their qualified insights in order to reflect on illness, medicine, and the role of physicians and nurses. All chapters overcome a reductive conception of a medicine that is only able to biologically explain illness. All three editors of this book are researchers in Padua, a city that has been described as the cradle of modern medicine. Galileo Galilei taught for eighteen years at the University of Padua and developed the scientific method there. During the same period, Padua was also the “nursery of arts”, as Shakespeare wrote. In fact, Padua developed, especially in the XIV, XV, and XVI centuries, an impressive and unique artistic culture thanks to artists such as Giotto, Donatello and Titian. Finally, the city of Saint Anthony is a place where a religious feeling strongly oriented towards charity is deeply rooted and strictly linking its history to that of its hospital. This textbook is a unique resource for students of medicine, nursing, bioethics, psychology, theology, and history of art.

This encyclopedia provides 300 interdisciplinary, cross-referenced entries that document the effect of the plague on Western society across the four centuries of the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors. Encyclopedia of the Black Death is the first A–Z encyclopedia to cover the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors and effects in Europe and the Islamic world from 1347–1770. It also bookends the period with entries on Biblical plagues and the Plague of Justinian, as well as modern-era material regarding related topics, such as the work of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, the Third Plague Pandemic of the mid-1800s, and plague in the United States. Unlike previous encyclopedic works about this subject that deal broadly with infectious disease and its social or historical contexts, including the author's own, this interdisciplinary work synthesizes much of the research on the plague and related medical history published in the last decade in accessible, compellingly written entries. Controversial subject areas such as whether "plague" was bubonic plague and the geographic source of plague are treated in a balanced and unbiased manner.

This work provides a new narrative for Orsanmichele in the era before the Renaissance. It examines Orsanmichele from the mid-thirteenth century, as the piazza transformed into the city’s grain market. It considers the market’s tandem confraternity, with its stunning Madonnas over three successive loggias. It examines the grain market and confraternity from a social, economic, political, and artistic perspective. It provides extensive data on the Florentine grain trade, sales at the market, and the nexus between traders, political leaders, and the confraternity. The work suggests that developments at Orsanmichele during the medieval period formed the basis for the Renaissance structure.

As the articles reprinted in this volume demonstrate, medieval men and women were curious about the world around them. They wanted to hear about distant lands and the various peoples who inhabited them. Travellers' tales, factual such as that of Marco Polo, and fictional, such as Chaucer's famous pilgrimage, entertained audiences across Europe. Colorful mappaemundi placed in churches illustrated these other lands and peoples for those who could not read. Medieval travel literature was not only entertaining, however, it was also informative, generating proto-ethnological information about the world beyond Latin Christendom that provided useful guidance for those such as merchants and missionaries who intended to travel abroad. Merchants learned about safe travel routes to foreign lands, about dangers to be avoided on the roads and at sea, about cultural practices that might interfere with their attempts at trade, and about products that would be suitable for foreign markets. Churchmen read the reports of missionaries to understand the beliefs of Muslims and other non-believers in order to debate with them and to learn their languages. These articles illustrate how travellers' reports in turn shaped the European response to the world beyond Europe, and are set in context in the editor's introduction.

An encyclopedia about various topics relating to urban studies.

"The Carrara Herbal is an exceptional illustrated book of materia medica (therapeutic substances drawn from plants, animals and minerals). It is exceptional in both its illustrations and its content, making it of interest to historians of art and medicine alike. The Herbal contains a translation into Paduan dialect of a Latin version of the mid-thirteenth-century Arabic pharmacopeia, Kitab al-Adwiya al-mufrada (The Book of Simple Medicines), written by Ibn Sarabi, a Christian physician working in al-Andalus and known in the Latin West as Serapion the Younger."--Introduction.