"Siena rivaled Florence in the arts throughout the 13th and 14th centuries: the important late medieval painter Duccio (1253?1319) was a Sienese, but worked across the peninsula, and the mural of "Good Government" by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico, or town hall, is a magnificent example of late-Medieval/early Renaissance art as well as a representation of the utopia of urban society as conceived during that period. Siena was devastated by the Black Death of 1348, and also suffered from ill-fated financial enterprises. In 1355, with the arrival of Charles IV of Luxembourg in the city, the population rose and suppressed the government of the Nove (Nine), establishing that Dodici (Twelve) nobles assisted by a council with a popular majority. This was also short-lived, being replaced by the Quindici (Fifteen) reformers in 1385, the Dieci (Ten, 1386?1387), Undici (Eleven, 1388?1398) and Twelve Priors (1398?1399) who, in the end, gave the city's seigniory to Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan in order to defend it from the Florentine expansionism."--Wikipedia.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.

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 he raised in light of modern scholarship. Taking a broad chronological and geographic approach, the collection offers a timely re-evaluation of a question of perennial interest to urban and political historians, as well as those with an interest in medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Police are generally thought of as an invention of the modern state, yet policing in medieval Italy had much in common with modern law enforcement. Foreign soldiers - hired as such to ensure their impartiality in enforcing the statutes - patrolled the streets daily, patting down residents for prohibited weapons and raiding homes and taverns for illicit gambling, sometimes on the basis of concrete intelligence. 'Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326' is the first book to examine focus on how urban governments in medieval Italy one region policed their populations. Focusing mostly on numerous Bologna Bolognese records from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Roberts demonstrates how police patrols compelled hundreds of residents to appear in court each year and functioned as a political tool to control violence and disorder. Using largely unexplored archival sources, he paints a vivid picture of how city residents experienced police power in everyday life, and challenges both popular and scholarly assumptions about the role of policing in medieval society.

Italy in the Middle Ages was unique among the countries of Europe in recreating, in a changed environment, the urban civilization of antiquity - the society, culture, and political formations of city-states. This book examines the origins and nature of this phenomenon from the fall of Rome to the eve of its consummation, the Italian Renaissance. The explanation is sought in Italy's singular `double existence' between two contrasted worlds - ancient and medieval. The ancient was characterised by the total predominance of the landed aristocracy in economy and society, enforced through a peculiar system of city states embracing town and country. The new medieval influences were marked by the separation of town, country and aristocracy, by the identification of towns with trade and a mercantile bourgeoisie, and by commercial and proto-industrial revolution. Italy shared in both worlds. It remained a land of cities and of an urbanized ruling class (except in the Norman South) and re-established territorial city states; but the staes were very different from those of antiquity, the city leaders in the commercial revolution, and Italy itself seen as a nation of shopkeepers, birthplace of capitalism. In this fascinating and ground-breaking study, Philip Jones traces in detail the tension and interaction between the two traditions, civic and patrician, mercantile and bourgeois, through all phases of Italian life to their culmination in two rival regimes of communes and despots.

Jurists and Jurisprudence in Medieval Italy is an original collection of texts exemplifying medieval Italian jurisprudence, known as the ius commune. Translated for the first time into English, many of the texts exist only in early printed editions and manuscripts. Featuring commentaries by leading medieval civil law jurists, notably Azo Portius, Accursius, Albertus Gandinus, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, and Baldus de Ubaldis, this book covers a wide range of topics, including how to teach and study law, the production of legal texts, the ethical norms guiding practitioners, civil and criminal procedures, and family matters. The translations, together with context-setting introductions, highlight fundamental legal concepts and practices and the milieu in which jurists operated. They offer entry points for exploring perennial subjects such as the professionalization of lawyers, the tangled relationship between law and morality, the role of gender in the socio-legal order, and the extent to which the ius commune can be considered an autonomous system of law.

Utilizing a uniquely rich collection of trial records and council meeting minutes from late medieval Bologna, this book offers the first study of summary justice and oligarchy in an Italian commune, demonstrating how new legal institutions arose in response to the increasingly exclusionary policies of the popolo government.

A Companion to Medieval Genoa introduces non-specialists to recent scholarship on the vibrant and source-rich medieval history of Genoa. Focusing mostly on the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, the volume positions the city of Genoa and the Genoese within the broader history of the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Thematic contributions highlight the interdependence of local, regional, and international concerns, and serve as a helpful corrective to the traditional overemphasis of Florence and Venice in the English-language historiography of medieval Italy. The volume thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of medieval Italy—as well as a handy introduction to the riches of the Genoese archives—to undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in related fields. Contributors are Ross Balzaretti, Carrie E. Beneš, Denise Bezzina, Roberta Braccia, Luca Filangieri, George L. Gorse, Paola Guglielmotti, Thomas Kirk, Sandra Macchiavello, Merav Mack, Jeffrey Miner, Rebecca Müller, Antonio Musarra, Sandra Origone, Giovanna Petti Balbi, Valeria Polonio, Gervase Rosser, Antonella Rovere, Stefan Stantchev, and Carlo Taviani.

"Explores the history and architecture of two city squares, constructed by rival political parties, in the Italian city of Parma from 1196 to 1300"--Provided by publisher.