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This study examines sonic legislation that was increasingly enacted in and around women’s institutions (convents, charity homes, and reform houses) in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Florence. Monitoring the sounds cloistered women made and heard was considered key to reform, the maintenance of social status, and the advancement of bodily/spiritual purity. Efforts to regulate urban sounds were rooted in the belief that sound was a physical force that acted on the body and soul with direct health implications. Sound, silence, and noise were formative agents. Yet sonic regulation was difficult to apply in any absolute sense, as Florentines on both sides of the cloister crafted dynamic urban soundscapes composed of multiple registers. Examining the links between sound, gender, health, and space, this paper reveals how preoccupations with noise and silence had profound implications in the early modern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Likely to outlive their typically older husbands, Florentine widows’ fate and that of their property were of abiding concern to husbands and their heirs. Widows’ dowries especially represented a “debt” for the husbands, which came due on the dissolution of marriage. A debt, however, in Florence and elsewhere, existed on the basis of trust, which for dowry arose at the point it was pledged by a woman’s father or other kin. The legal maneuvers of one Florentine widow, Monna Vaggia, and the reactions of learned jurists to the problems she raised, show that such trust might be taken to persist into widowhood, as her husband sought in his testament to keep her and her dowry at the service of his heirs and his family in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reception of art is often described in ocularcentric terms, but all five senses could engage devotional objects in late medieval and early modern Europe. This article explores this phenomenon by considering a wooden crucifix with movable arms made by Donatello for the Franciscan church of S. Croce in Florence in the early fifteenth century. It makes new suggestions about the work's original location, its possible patrons, and its functions and reception, especially during the rituals associated with Good Friday. It also reflects on the challenges scholars face when taking a multisensory approach to premodern visual and material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal associations of pious women, or consororities, were rare in Italy before the second half of the sixteenth century. This article examines a previously unstudied consorority, called the Company of the Holy Miracle, founded in Florence in 1534 by a group of Benedictine nuns who revived an older, cult-based organization to enlarge their local influence. Composed solely of laywomen and nuns, the Miracolo Company opened up a public arena in which members could express their religiosity and govern themselves, using diverse corporate models. Shared administrative and devotional activities allowed the socially muted membership to create fictive kinship ties and sustain cross-class sociability at a time when all-male brotherhoods were becoming more homogeneous and hierarchical. Founded in the transition from republic to principate, the group reflected both the greater localism of cult life and the growing clout of nunneries, which structured new forms of public life for Florentine women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1506 and 1615, Florence opened seven shelters for orphaned and abandoned children and adolescents and Bologna eight. These were fluid institutions, rooted in medieval charitable hospitals, shaped by the models of family, religious house, and workhouse, and subject to continuing metaphorphoses in later decades. Work provided income for these shelters and training for their charges. Differing work patterns (e.g., between work conducted inside or outside the home) highlight distinctions of gender and class between the homes of a particular city as well as distinctions in the political and social realities faced by Bologna and Florence. A general workhouse for the poor in Bologna allowed its orphanages and conservatories to be more selective in enrolling children and more successful in reintegrating them back into society. In the absence of a general workhouse, some Florentine conservatories were forced to fulfill that function (by enrolling larger numbers of poorer and unhealthy children) and suffered higher death rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates examples of transcultural and transtemporal cultural encounters brought about by the deliberate assemblage of iconic objects in the city of Florence, and in the process interrogates issues of authenticity, identity, place-making, and transcultural and transtemporal dialogues. Specifically, Palazzo Strozzi and Piazza della Signoria will be the focus of the debate. These two sites, together with their symbolic value and works of art will be looked at at the moment in which their space is shared by works of reputed and acclaimed international contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei, Bill Viola, Jan Fabre and Jeff Koons. The meeting of diverse artistic practises generates a debate that talks directly to issues of cultural identity, and opens up new spaces of aesthetic and ethical apperception based on intersection and transformation. The article engages issues of aesthetic validation, and invites a reflection on the ability of a whole city and community to negotiate a sense of identity and value in the face of global and international forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking an interdisciplinary approach the article offers a fresh legal historical understanding of the Fifth Story of the Eighth Day in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Detailed analysis of the tale reveals much about the realities of the administration of justice in fourteenth century Florence and contemporary expectations of those exercising judicial authority. In making apparent the expectation that judges would look and act in a certain manner, the article suggests that Boccaccio's story can be interpreted as offering an insight into the extent to which public perception of a man's identity as a judge was dependent upon his appearance and attire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay challenges the notion that the early modern news-gathering practices and networks in Europe crystallized only in the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century, corresponding with the emergence of permanent embassies and state-run postal systems. Inspired by an article published in 2005 by Georg Christ that for the first time problematized this notion, the author offers additional evidence conveyed in the experience of late medieval Venice and Florence, while relying on contemporary chronicles, merchant letters and diplomatic dispatches. Mainly through the analysis of three historical case studies, the essay argues that the existing networks of lower-tier diplomatic representatives, sea captains and military liaisons were already functioning as nodal points of an intelligence-gathering mechanism whose news reports usually ended up circulating in the public sphere. But, as further shown in this study, it was the merchant circles that decisively shaped such a news-gathering network by lending it its own matter-of-fact writing style, as well as allowing it to rely on its own scarsella system of couriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor, politician and president of the Assembly of Council of Europe, Giuseppe Vedovato founds his first field of action in Florentine settings of Christian inspiration. In this context, Vedovato's activity concerned especially the city but had important impact also in other parts of Tuscany and outside Tuscany. This essay will try to tell some crucial moments and the main works within Florentine and regional Catholic movement, to understand basic principles and future behavior taken by Vedovato as politician. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the limited literature that exists on the «Cesare Alfieri» Institute in Florence, the «Rassegna di scienze sociali e politiche» (1883-1894) still lacks a systematic and depth studies. As a first approach to the contents of the Review, the present essay aims to investigate the attitude about the social question, object of many articles. With fluctuations between the technical and political levels, the «Rassegna», economically and politically liberal on the Right, looked to the world of workers in a paternalistic perspective, aiming to reconcile the preservation of the established order and the acceptance of social reforms, remaining marginalized and overcome by the approaching of the events in the end of Nineteenth Century crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article calls attention to the personal accounts kept by Florentines for their private affairs. Well over a thousand of these documents survive from the late fourteenth century onwards, and they constitute a source that for the early period probably has no equal for any other city in Europe. Kept according to the highest standards of accounting practice at the time, these accounts document the personal activity of Florentines in the marketplace outside the sphere of their business interests, an area barely adumbrated in the literature on the economic and social history of the city. Of the several functions this activity served, this article concentrates exclusively on just one: the household economy. It explores this subject through a survey of several hundred such accounts with the objective of bringing this source into the extensive literature in Florentine studies on the family, material culture and the economy in general. The discussion emphasizes the importance of change across time and touches on the wider issue of the cultural significance of the accounting practice that brought these documents into existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians and Publishing Houses at Florence have produced many essays for Florence centenary (1865-1871) as Capital of the Kingdom of Italy. The decision to move the capital from Torino to Florence was caused by questions of national and international politics and this event was important in the way of life of the city. During this period, Florence increased its residents and with a new urbanistic plane of Giuseppe Poggi, became an important city in the cultural and institutional progress particularly in the Institutions of High Education. There are also some shadow elements in this historiographical essays, for example the excessive financial crisis of Florentine Municipality after the quickly transfer of the Capital to Rome. Anyway these years were important for Florence to become a more modern town of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Sala Degli Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy. Particular focus is given to how four painters worked on the monument, including Francesco Furini and how he utilized motifs from poems written by Ludovico Ariosto. Additional topics discussed include frescoe painting, how the art in Sala degli Argenti was commissioned for the wedding between Vittoria della Rovere and Ferdinando II de' Medici, and the use of allegory in art.

Copyright of Gesnerus is the property of Schwabe Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Story of the Fat Woodcarver, written by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, probably recalls a popular anecdote about a Florentine artisan who was humiliated by his friend, Filippo di ser Brunellesco. The joke played by the architect has been at the forefront of scholarly interest, while the main protagonist has so far received limited attention. This article aims to reconstruct the life of Manetto di Jacopo Amannatini, that is, the Fat Woodcarver, in the context of his social relationships with the other figures in the story. It argues that Manetti's account is grounded in concrete historical facts and therefore provides us with a unique picture of the intersections that existed between artisan and merchant networks in and beyond early Renaissance Florence. Manetto's character may well symbolize those itinerant craftsmen who, by acknowledging their position in their own communities, and thanks to their skills and their courage to migrate to remote places, like the Kingdom of Hungary, managed to improve their social status significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of gender dynamics in Renaissance Florence, Italy. Particular focus is given on the statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini's brutal representation of the decapitated Medusa. It examines the effect of women's culture on men's culture, and the relations between men and women as abstract gender entities.

This paper explores some 'neglected' books and essays by Henry James, Thomas A. Trollope, Theodosia Garrow Trollope, Enrico Nencioni, Helen Zimmern, Kate Field, Linda White Villari and Cora Fabbri -- and offers a new perspective on the complex network of human, political, cultural and artistic connections established by the Anglo-American community and the Italian one in 19th century Florence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lyceum Club Internazionale of Firenze was founded in 1908 by Constance Smedley, a young British girl, who had a fascinating dream. Constance wanted to make a silent revolution, helping women to improve their self-consciousness and gain their independence. The Lyceum Club Constance founded in London in 1904 was the cradle of an intellectual movement, based on female solidarity. Immediately later, the clubs of Paris and Berlin followed. With the passing of time, the earlier utopie dream turned into a real ambition, a concrete goal. In 1908 Constance arrived in Florence and the cultural environment of the city fascinated her. In Florence, there was a significant English speaking community, with a long lasting tradition. Many British and American women had elected Florence as their homeland: Constance became familiar with many Florentine learned and refined women. Many of them were members of an antique nobility and their family names evoked famous personages, who had written very important chapters of Florentine history. She understood that Florence had to be the headquarter of the Italian Lyceum Club. In 1908, the Florentine International Lyceum Club was a reality and for more than a century the Club has been promoting cultural activities and educational initiatives, and it still does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1540s, Giambattista Gelli and Pierfrancesco Giambullari introduced a controversial theory concerning the foundation of Florence. Marshaling spurious textual sources and archaeological remains, they claimed that the city was Etruscan, challenging the long-standing belief in its Roman origin. In a painstaking rebuttal, Vincenzo Borghini rejected their sources, methods, and conclusions. Their three treatises are among the earliest efforts to develop critical methods to establish an artifact's culture of origin, whether Etruscan, Roman, or medieval. While history has looked more favorably on the work of Borghini, all three manipulated the histories of artifacts to serve competing narratives of Florence's past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As plague approached in August 1630, Florence's health officials commissioned the aristocratic lay brothers of the confraternity of the Archangel Michael ('San Michele') to search the city's streets and alleys for signs of disease. While the extraordinary record of this 'Visitation' is known to health historians, the present article instead relates it to a long history of urban surveys and censuses in which Florentines fashioned themselves in intimate relation to the physical spaces and places of the urban environment. In August 1630 this process of mental mapping produced a malodorous inversion of the patriotic visions we popularly associate with the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. Florence emerges in the Visitation as a nightmare city drowning in ordure, suffocating on its own fumes and leaking like a sieve. Spatial intimacy, usually associated with notions of productive neighbourhood sociability and community, appears here as an existential threat. Meanwhile, San Michele's fratelli were forced to balance genuine Christian compassion for the suffering men and women whom they were pledged to assist with long-standing suspicion of the poor, both as a class and as the potential vectors of pestilence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Forties of the Nineteenth century the Government of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany tried to reorganize the Florentine libraries which for years were not able to meet the expectations of the scholars. In 1844 the expert bibliographer Giuseppe Molini, member of a special commission created by the Grand Duke, proposed and started to implement a radical reorganization of the Florentine public libraries through the redistributing of the material owned by individual institutions, the sale of books considered duplicate and the unification of the six libraries, existing at that time, in three institutions: a «Medical and Surgical Library»; a «Legai Library»; a «great Universal Library». The project aroused curiosity and fears, of which became the spokesman Cesare Guasti, a young scholar from Prato, who made it of public domain writing some newspaper articles. The reorganaization of the Florentine libraries proposed by Giuseppe Molini soon became subject of criticism. The literary controversy first, the facts related to the revolution and counter-revolution in the Grand Duchy then, prevented to carry out Molini's plan, that was suspended in 1851 and later abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By crossing data from Florentine collections with notarial records produced in Egypt and Syria, this article focuses on the Florentine trading networks operating in the eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth century. It highlights two factors influencing Florence’s long-distance trade in the area: political unrest characteristic of Italian Renaissance cities, and the scant interest of the Florentine government in building diplomatic and commercial institutions. Initially woven by exiled merchant-bankers and offshore companies, the network reconfigured towards the middle of the century around a group of entrepreneurs based in Rhodes, who were deeply entrenched in local finance and in business with the Islamic cities. The article provides a more complex view of relations between government institutions and Mediterranean long-distance trade by approaching the rise of the Medici in Florentine politics and their handling of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the potential value of textiles and clothing as a means for a female consort, whose position was dependent on a variety of mutable factors and who frequently lacked access to independent institutional authority, to exert influence, gain loyalty, assert status and express ambiguity and even conflict. Taking the underexplored subject of Giovanna d'Austria, wife of Francesco de' Medici and the first Grand Duchess of Florence, as a case study, I examine her use of material culture in the context of her increasingly precarious position at the Florentine court. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from account books and receipts to ambassadors' reports and private correspondence, Giovanna's activities are contextualized through comparison with her predecessor, Eleonora di Toledo; her husband Francesco's mistress, Bianca Cappello and her sisters, Barbara, Duchess of Ferrara, and Eleonora of Austria, Duchess of Mantua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the volume XII, 2017 issue of the journal "Annali di storia di Firenze»."

Through the use of new sources (some of which have been discovered on this occasion), the check of old data, and a different reading of the available information, the article throws light on the little known life of Alberto degli Albizzi, scion of a prominent family of the Florentine patriciate, which was powerful in the 14-15th century until the advent of the Medici family. So far this particular figure, who was a close friend of Coluccio Salutati, Lapo da Castiglionchio and Franco Sacchetti, had been known above all for some poems and a letter to pope Martin V. But his story had been blurred and mistakenly built by 19th century genealogists and later scholars who had relied on them. Whereas now it is available for the first time in its objective aspects, all linked to a crucial phase of Florentine history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leonardo Bruni’s well-known oration, the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, has long stood at the center of discussions on the emergence of the modern republican state. Recent historiographical trends have emphasized the degree to which Bruni’s oration represents a propagandistic attempt both to portray Florence as a territorial power of Northern Italy keen to impose its sovereign authority on neighboring polities and as a republic intent on fashioning an image of itself as a popular sovereignty. It is in this second element of Bruni’s oration that we can discover his rhetorical purposes: he needed to give a distorted image of Florence as enjoying “popular” rule precisely because Florence was in fact moving in the opposite direction towards a more oligarchic concentration of political authority. The essay investigates the changes contemplated in revisions to Florence’s juridical codes at precisely the time of the oration’s composition, suggesting that when these two sources are juxtaposed, Bruni’s oration appears as a strongly ideological literary work the rhetorical gestures of which camouflage the actual historical and legal developments of Florence’s political life in the early fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I examine friendship as a subject of political theory rather than as a social practice relevant to political life. As suggested by Francesco d'Altobianco Alberti in the poem recited at the first certame coronario, two ideas of political friendship existed side by side in Medicean Florence. They appeared in full in Palmieri's Vita civile and in Platina's De optimo cive. As I will show, the Ciceronian language of friendship is used in these works to resolve two key problems of Renaissance political thought: the need for political unity and the just way of appointing the governing elite. Palmieri placed friendship in the political sphere of concord: he was a republican imperialist who believed that civic friendship protected the political unity of the city, without which Florence would not have been able to expand. Platina, on the other hand, situated friendship in the political sphere of counsel: his concern was to support the selection of the most virtuous and knowledgeable citizens, worthy of access to public office. While Palmieri looked back to the city's medieval past, Platina cast light on the politics of friendship that allowed the Medici to stay in power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay advances our understanding of early Medici patronage by focusing on the intriguing figure of Piera de' Medici ( c. 1400-1482), who matured into one of the most powerful abbesses in Renaissance Florence. As a religious woman, Piera used her ties to the city's ruling family to benefit her Vallombrosan community of S. Verdiana; in turn, it was through her agency that the Medici established long-term claims on the convent, its consecrated virgins and its sacred cult. This case study shows how Piera combined rhetorical skills, political acumen and gift exchange to build a relationship with Giovanni de' Medici (1421-1463), whose patronage activities are less well known than those of other family members. It also invites a reconsideration of the role Florentine women played in producing visual culture by comparing Giovanni's donations to gifts made by his wife, Ginevra Alessandri. This perspective is especially valuable given that scholars have commented on the scarcity of female artistic patrons in fifteenth-century Florence compared to other areas of Italy. By considering different classes of objects and models of exchange, this essay contends that Florentine women played a more expansive role in cultural production than previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the conflicts between interventionism and neutrality in Florence, Italy, during the year from May 1914 to May 1915. Topics discussed include the intervention of Italy in the First World War, and the Italian flag that represented two antagonist movements; the relationship between nationalism and irredentism in Italy; and demonstrations by workers that were caused by increasing unemployment and rising cost of living in Italy.

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on an analysis of how the identities of women were recorded in legal and familial documents, this article argues that women’s social identities were primarily and permanently linked to that of their natal families, particularly to their fathers. Given the frequent shifts in women’s living positions, marital status, and legal guardianship, women’s ties to their natal families have often been seen as tenuous. However, identifying a woman through her patriline was common practice and made practical sense in that it identified the individual woman in a permanent way and reflected the enduring ties between a women and her patriline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the influence of pottery imports from the Islamic Nasrid kingdom in Spain to Florence, Italy, in the 15th century. Topics include signature style of lusterware ceramics from Malaga, Spain, the evolution of the term "maiolica" as a type of pottery, and patronization of lusterware by Italian plutocrats.

An essay is presented which discusses the history of the Giardino Delle Stalle in Florence, Italy and the Giardino dell'Arsenale in Pisa, Italy from the mid 16th century through the late 19th century. The role that the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Italy Cosimo I de' Medici played in developing the aforementioned gardens is discussed. An overview of the garden historian Alberto Chiarugi's perspective on the history of the Florentine and Pisa botanical gardens, including their designs, is provided.

The second half of the 19th Century was in Florence a period of extraordinary and fruitful interest in the oriental world when the philological and oriental studies were promoted. Thanks to the fervour of these studies, in 1878 Florence was designated to host the 4th Congress of the Orientalists. The "Orient" excited curiosity and collecting passion to such an extent that we could argue that the legacy of the magnificent Medicean collecting was inherited by the private middle-classes. Moreover, the new cultural context contributed to transforming the taste, it gave rise to new styles in architecture as well as in decoration and generally in the applied arts. After examining these topics, we will focus our attention on a little known fact that we could describe as the rebuilt "Orient" for entertainment, that is to say the Florentine Carnival in 1886, an event of the "disquieting" exoticism by which Europe represented the Islamic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the marketing and availability of medicines in Florence, Italy especially through their pharmacies. Topics include the Florence city-based retail outlet the Speziale del Giglio and the products it sold, the social and economic conditions of Florentines, and descriptions on the way of life of apothecaries and their pharmacies.

The article discusses the history of the marketing and availability of medicines in Florence, Italy especially through their pharmacies. Topics include the transactions of these pharmacies with their clients who would often default on their payments and go into debt, social and economic conditions of Florentines, and descriptions on the way of life of apothecaries and their pharmacies.

The article discusses the history of the marketing and availability of medicines in Florence, Italy especially through their pharmacies and how they did and recorded transactions with their clients. Topics include social and economic conditions of Florentines, descriptions on the way of life of apothecaries and their pharmacies, and the personal network of clients that the apothecaries maintained.

The article discusses the history of the marketing and trade of medicines and other goods in Florence, Italy especially the trade of wax at the retail shop the Giglio. Topics include the consumption patterns of wax of the Giglio's customers, descriptions on the ways of life of apothecaries and the medical products they used to sell, and the social and economic conditions of Florentines and how it used to influence trade.

The article discusses the marketing and availability of medicines in the pharmacies of Florence, Italy through apothecaries. Topics include retail shops in Florence who traded in medical goods like the retail outlet Speziale al Giglio, and the social and economic conditions in Florence which let the apothecaries flourish.

The article discusses the history of the marketing and availability of medicines in Florence, Italy especially through their pharmacies. Topics include social and economic conditions of Florentines, descriptions on the way of life of apothecaries and their pharmacies, and how pharmacology worked in the fifteenth-century.

The article discusses the history of the marketing and availability of medicines in Florence, Italy especially the trade of sugar and spices through their pharmacies intended for medicinal use. Topics include the social and economic conditions of Florentines, descriptions on the way of life of apothecaries, and data from the wholesale and inventory records of spices and sugar from the retail shop the Giglio.

The article discusses a portable altar or altarino painted in 1509-1515 by the Florentine artist Ridolfo Ghirlandaio owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with particular focus given to the altarino's use of iconcography relating to the Virgin Mary and the Servite monastic order. A brief overview of the Servite order and its significance to Florentine history is offered, and the likelihood that the monk depicted in the work is Beato Filippo Benizi, the first Servite to be canonized, is explored.

The article discusses the use of emergency powers and mechanism of political repression in Renaissance Florence, Italy, advancing the thesis that the theory of consensus politics characterized by political participation by a broad range of citizens is not able to accurately describe the methods employed in Renaissance Florence to maintain public order and administer criminal justice, as uncovered by documents in the Archivio di Stato of Florence, which show a centralization of power occurring in the city beginning in the 1380s. The author argues that government emergency powers emerged in their contemporary form in the Middle Ages.

The article discusses sexuality and politics in 16th century Florence, Italy, particularly focusing on Alessandro de' Medici (ca. 1511-1537), who was the duke of Florence, and Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), his successor, and their sexual behavior and what this tells scholars about sexuality during the Renaissance. The medical opinions about the anatomical differences between men and women at that time are discussed. The popular opinion about Alessandro amongst his contemporaries was that he was a poor ruler and effeminate, which was in sharp contrast to Cosimo's reputation for monogamy and his respectful view of women. A history of Florence, beginning with the takeover of the government by the Medicis, is presented and details about the rule of Alessandro and Cosimo are discussed.

This article statistically analyzes quantitative data from numerous sources in order to assess changes in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility during the period from 1282 to 1494. During this period, three systems of social stratification coexisted — wealth, political office, and age of family—but these contending status systems were not consistent in their rankings of families. Each status system was conservative in the sense that elite families at the top of that hierarchy married each other in order to stabilize their position. But because of inconsistency in rankings, contradiction within the elite opened up the Florentine marriage system to widespread upward social mobility by new men. In their own families, successful new men aggressively imitated their economically and politically declining status superiors. Sharp class divisions thereby blurred into continuous and negotiable status gradients. These open-elite patterns of social mobility, present throughout the early Florentine Renaissance, were most extreme during the Albizzi regime, immediately following the Ciompi Revolt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]