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“Larvatus prodeo,” announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: “I come forward, masked.” Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many early modern Europeans besides Descartes—princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike—chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. This work crisscrosses Europe, with a special focus on Italy, to explore attitudes toward the art of dissimulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussing many canonical and lesser-known works, the book examines the treatment of dissimulation in early modern treatises and writings on the court, civility, moral philosophy, political theory, and in the visual arts.

This book provides an overview of Italian history from the Black Death to the rise of the Medici in 1434 and beyond into the early modern period. The book explores those pivotal years in Florence and ranges over northern Italy, with forays into the histories of Genoa, Milan, and Venice. Five of the chapters explore themes in the premodern period and delve into Italy's political, social, economic, religious, and cultural development. Among these pieces is a synoptic view of the Italian Renaissance. The last five chapters focus more narrowly on Florentine topics, including a fascinating look at the dangers and anxieties that threatened Florence in the fifteenth century during Leonardo's time and a mini-biography of Alessandra Strozzi, whose letters to her exiled sons contain the evidence for her eventful life.

Like a particularly good detective story, this richly textured book follows tantalizing clues in its hunt for a group of missing artistic masterpieces. It opens a new window on the lives of noblewomen in the Renaissance, the brilliantly colored tapestries that were the ultimate artistic luxury of the day, and the popular and influential fourteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan. The tapestries around which this story revolves are linked to de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, originally published 600 years ago in 1405. The book is aT tribute to women that honors 200 female warriors, scientists, queens, philosophers, and builders of cities. Though twenty-five manuscripts of the City of Ladies still exist, references to tapestries based on the book are elusive. The book takes us along as it tracks down records of six sets of tapestries whose owners included Elizabeth I of England; Margaret of Austria; and Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. It examines the intriguing details of these women's lives—their arranged marriages, their power, their affairs of state—asking what interest they had in owning these particular tapestries. Could the tapestries have represented their thinking? As it reveals the historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects of this unique story, the book also gives a fascinating account of medieval and early-Renaissance tapestry production and of de Pizan's remarkable life and legacy.

Renaissance Florence has often been described as the birthplace of modern individualism, as reflected in the individual genius of its great artists, scholars, and statesmen. The historical research of recent decades has instead shown that Florentines during the Renaissance remained enmeshed in relationships of family, neighborhood, guild, patronage, and religion that, from a twenty-first-century perspective, greatly limited the scope of individual thought and action. The sixteen chapters in this volume expand the groundbreaking work of Gene Brucker, the historian in recent decades who has been most responsible for the discovery and exploration of these pre-modern qualities of the Florentine Renaissance. Exploring new approaches to the social world of Florentines during this fascinating era, the chapters are arranged in three groups. The first deals with the exceptionally resilient and homogenous Florentine merchant elite, the true protagonist of much of Florentine history. The second considers Florentine religion and Florence's turbulent relations with the Church. The last group of chapters looks at criminals, expatriates, and other outsiders to Florentine society.