In the summer of 1399 a wave of popular devotion swept through Italy from the Alps to Rome. Men, women, and children from city and countryside joined in pious processions lasting nine days. Dubbed "Bianchi" because of their white robes, they listened to sermons, sang hymns, observed dietary restrictions, and prayed for "peace and mercy." Daniel E. Bornstein reconstructs the history of the Bianchi in unparalleled detail, and his conclusions offer new insight into the character of late medieval Christianity. Drawing on a wide range of sources including diaries, hymns, and government reports, Bornstein offers nuanced analyses of both the spiritual and the political dimensions of the movement. After describing the origins of the Bianchi as a movement concerned with the conflict and violence of the age, he traces its spread through Italy, paying particular attention to local variations. Focusing on the relationship between lay participants and ecclesiastical authorities, Bornstein demonstrates that the Bianchi represent what might be called a popular orthodoxy—a spontaneous and deeply sincere rallying to the approved beliefs and traditional practices of the church. In conclusion, he argues that scholars who have assumed a sharp division between lay and clerical religion in the late Middle Ages have misconstrued the development of Christianity in fundamental ways.

Providing new insights into the Bianchi devotions, a medieval popular religious revival which responded to an outbreak of plague at the turn of the fifteenth century, this book takes a comparative, local and regional approach to the Bianchi, challenging traditional presentations of the movement as homogeneous whole. Combining a rich collection of textual, visual, and material sources, the study focuses on the two Tuscan towns of Lucca and Pistoia. Alexandra R.A. Lee demonstrates how the Bianchi processions in central Italy were moulded by secular and ecclesiastical authorities and shaped by local traditions as they attempted to prevent an epidemic.

Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.

Miraculous images are the focus for an exploration of art and devotion in Renaissance Italy.

The field of Venetian studies has experienced a significant expansion in recent years, and the Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 provides a single volume overview of the most recent developments. It is organized thematically and covers a range of topics including political culture, economy, religion, gender, art, literature, music, and the environment. Each chapter provides a broad but comprehensive historical and historiographical overview of the current state and future directions of research. The Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 represents a new point of reference for the next generation of students of early modern Venetian studies, as well as more broadly for scholars working on all aspects of the early modern world. Contributors are Alfredo Viggiano, Benjamin Arbel, Michael Knapton, Claudio Povolo, Luciano Pezzolo, Anna Bellavitis, Anne Schutte, Guido Ruggiero, Benjamin Ravid, Silvana Seidel Menchi, Cecilia Cristellon, David D’Andrea, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Wolfgang Wolters, Dulcia Meijers, Massimo Favilla, Ruggero Rugolo, Deborah Howard, Linda Carroll, Jonathan Glixon, Paul Grendler, Edward Muir, William Eamon, Edoardo Demo, Margaret King, Mario Infelise, Margaret Rosenthal and Ronnie Ferguson.

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the 'other', and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures, as with AIDS during the last two decades of the twentieth century. However, scholars and public intellectuals, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics. Instead of sparking hatred and blame, this study traces epidemics' socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture: that epidemic diseases have more often unified societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion.

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy is the first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on over 100 contemporary chronicles and diaries, the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo's diplomatic dispatches, mercantile letters, and commentary, and 586 collective supplications scattered through archival sources from towns and villages in the Grand duchy of Milan, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents and their patterns in comparative perspectives, first with the late medieval heyday of popular revolt and then with regions north of the Alps. Cohn finds new developments during the early modern period such as an increase in women rebels, mutinies of soldiers, and new tactics of revolts such as shop closures, peaceful demonstrations of strength, and use of religious processions for discussions of tactics and strategies for obtaining logistic advantage. At the same time, these protests show convergences with the medieval Italian past, with leaders coming almost exclusively from the ranks of nonelites, religious ideology playing a surprisingly minor role, and the majority of revolts centring overwhelming in towns and cities. Finally, this study demonstrates that democracies do not just die under the duress of military occupation and growing powers of autocratic regimes. Ideals of representation and equality not only persisted; they could emerge in new forms and with greater sophistication.

This book traces the dynamic advances in textile technology and changes in the structure of demand that accompanied the rise, in the late Middle Ages, of an Italian industry geared to mass production of cotton fabrics. The Italian manufacture, based on borrowed techniques and imitations of Islamic cloth, was the earliest large-scale cotton industry in western Europe. It thus marked a pivotal stage in the transmission of the knowledge and use of this textile fibre from the Mediterranean basin to northern Europe. The success of the Italians in creating new markets for a wide variety of products that included pure cotton, as well as mixed fabrics combining cotton with linen, hemp, wool and silk, permanently altered the patterns of taste and consumption in European society. Cotton, in various stages of proceeding, was at the heart of a complex network of communications that linked the north Italian towns to the source of raw materials and to international markets for finished goods. In the developing urban economy of northern Italy, cotton played a role comparable in magnitude to that of wool and shared with the latter certain basic features of early capitalistic organization.

Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence investigates the meaning of fraternity in terms of the ritual relations created in religious brotherhoods or confraternities during that period. The book focuses on the sociability of the confraternity as revealed in the patterns of membership and in forms of ceremony. Florence's confraternities serve as a vehicle for examining the relationship between ritual behavior and social organization. The text discusses the ways in which Florentines use forms of ritual to define, protect, and alter their relations with one another. The book reviews the social relations in Renaissance Florence through the structure of social relations, the politics of amity or enmity, and social relations in relation to economic exchange. Social organization and ritual actions include confraternal organization, membership, symbolic fraternity, and the rites of community. The book explores the company of San Paolo in the fifteenth century where the confraternity offers an introduction to the nature of citywide community, its republican institutions, and its civic values. The book also examines traditional confraternities in crisis, the nature of the disruptions that leads to the emergence of new confraternal organizations and values. In the sixteenth-century, confraternities reveal major departures in ideology, ritual, and social organization. They have also introduced the principles of hierarchy into confraternal membership, as well as a new ethic of obedience. The book will prove delightful reading for sociologists, historians studying Florentine society, and researchers interested in the history of religious brotherhood and confraternities.