The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento

by Guido Ruggiero

This book offers a rich and exciting new way of thinking about the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a historical movement. Guido Ruggiero's work is based on archival research and new insights of social and cultural history and literary criticism, with a special emphasis on everyday culture, gender, violence and sexuality. The book offers a vibrant and relevant critical study of a period too long burdened by anachronistic and outdated ways of thinking about the past. Familiar, yet alien; pre-modern, but suggestively post-modern; attractive and troubling, this book returns the Italian Renaissance to center stage in our past and in our historical analysis.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Italy, Renaissance, Art, Research

653 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 31, 2014

About the author

Guido Ruggiero, Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences, was born in Danbury, Connecticut and grew up in Webster, New York, a small rural town along the old shore line of Lake Ontario. After earning a B.A. with a heavy focus on ancient history and philosophy at the University of Colorado, he went on to UCLA where as a University of California Regent's Intern Fellow he earned an M.A. (1967) and a Ph.D. (1972). As a Regent's Fellow he began his long love affair with Venice and the Venetian Archives in 1970 and has been returning there for his research ever since. He makes his home in Treviso, Italy, when he is not teaching at UM.

Professor Ruggiero has published on the history of gender, sex, crime, magic, science and everyday culture, primarily in renaissance and early modern Italy. Early in his career he focused on social science history, but his interests have expanded toward yet more interdisciplinary approaches, including microhistory, narrative history, and the melding of literature, literary criticism, and archival history. His new book, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento, published by Cambridge University Press recently won the AAIS (the American Association for Italian Studies) prize for the best book of 2014 on premodern Italy. A radical rethinking of the period, it has been hailed as a work that offers an exciting paradigm for the Italian Renaissance both as a period and a movement. He has also published Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (Rutgers, 1980), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985), Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance(Oxford, 1993), Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2007); as well as Sex and Gender in Historical Perspectives (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Johns Hopkins,1991), and History from Crime (Johns Hopkins, 1993), edited with Edward Muir. In addition he has edited The Blackwell Companion to the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) and Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 2003) translated with Laura Giannetti. He also edited the series Studies in the History of Sexuality (1985-2002) for Oxford University Press and was a co-editor of the six volume, Encyclopedia of European Social History for Scribner's (2002). In addition to being a fellow or visiting professor at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence (1990-1991, 2012), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1981-82; 1991), and at the American Academy in Rome (Fall, 2011), he has won a number of grants and fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1990). Ruggiero regularly teaches classes on the Italian Renaissance, the new social and cultural history, and the uses of literature for history.

Reviews

[Jo Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this so much that I was sorry to finish it.

It's hard to express how good this book is -- comprehensive, well written, illuminating and thought provoking on both small and large points. It's full of the kind of details that illuminate, and the kind of big picture assessments thatdraw everything together.

When it comes to books about the Renaissance there's not much middle ground between the scholarly and obfuscating and the shallow. This is scholarly in the best sense, erudite and also lively.

Everyone wants to read this.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most accessible yet in-depth histories I’ve read. Lively and engaging. It’s been my tour guide through the past month of Dante, Cellini, Machiavelli, Ariosto, et. al. Highly recommended.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid, broad overview of Renaissance culture and society in Italy that is specialized enough for the academic, but also appropriate for a general reader. I appreciated his thematic and chronological approach to the subject; however, the book would have benefited from better editing, especially in the last few chapters. I noticed far too many incorrect dates in his discussions on early sixteenth-century Rome (i.e. Pope Clement dying in 1434; Raphael's timeline in Rome was off by several years, etc) and they detracted from the flow of the author's argument.

[Umut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prof. Ruggiero's books are totally fascinating, groundbreaking, amazing works. I must say he is one of the most successful historians and he surely knows how to deal with methodology.
As someone who wishes to become specialized on the Mediterranean part of the history, I recommend everyone to read this book.
You won't find a classic political, diplomatic history in here but instead you will encounter with all of the other sides of a civilization whether violence, sex, honor, virtue.

[Peter Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive book on the Rinascimento. A pretty long read but much greater depth and analysis than many books I've read on the topic.

[Bertrand Marotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad. Some intelligent analysis.