Good books about the Italian Renaissance?

July 3, 2009 1:04 PM

Can anyone recommend good books about the interaction of Italian City-States during the Renaissance? My brother is writing a 200 page paper over the next three years, and his topic is Rome, Venice, Florence, and Milan and how their interactions shaped the Italian Renaissance. He doesn't have any good books to go on, and I'm at a loss to help him (I'm not a history person) Any help would be appreciated.
posted by nickhb to Education (18 answers total)

...how, exactly, did he get into a position where he's writing a book-sized document without having a huge stack of sources to begin from?
posted by Tomorrowful at 1:09 PM on July 3, 2009

He's in a major accelerated program in his high school, and the project is like a final theis with several options. He could have done scientific research, shadowed a doctor and written about it, or choose his own humanities project. He chose this. He has to write the first 50 pages (which are about the history of Italy up until the Renaissance) by the end of the summer.
posted by nickhb at 1:18 PM on July 3, 2009

Your brother should visit his local librarian. This is exactly the kind of thing they do for a living.
posted by fixedthefernback at 1:34 PM on July 3, 2009

I had a great professor named George Gorse at Pomona college who specialized in urban growth history, with a particular emphasis on the Renaissance in Florence, Venice, Genoa, Milan. If your brother could contact professor Gorse at Pomona, I bet Gorse would reel off a huge bibliography for him. It's an extraordinary topic.
posted by effluvia at 1:52 PM on July 3, 2009

Most of the material on this topic will not be written with a high-school level audience in mind. This sounds like madness to me. But if he's determined to go through with this, then the local reference librarian is his friend. Better yet, see if he can get (i.e. pay for) access to a proper university library.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:14 PM on July 3, 2009

Where does he live? If there's a university nearby, he needs to see if their library provides lending access and research assistance to local high-school students. I don't see how this project is going to happen without that. Additionally, he's going to need access to scholarly papers and journals, many of which will be inaccessible to someone without a university e-mail account.

Furthermore, does he know how to use academic research tools? Here's UC Irvine's page for high school and community college students. Start at their home page and have him go through their tutorial on using a university library to get the most out of it.
posted by mdonley at 2:34 PM on July 3, 2009

If he's in an accelerated program, maybe he can ask if one of the teachers/supervisors involved there can't pull some strings and get him access to a university library as others have suggested. It might not involve paying.
posted by No-sword at 3:01 PM on July 3, 2009

Two hundred Microsoft Word pages isn't a paper. It's a book, equivalent to substantially more pages if it were actually bound into a volume. Who is going to read and grade this monster?

But seriously, any history of the Italian Renaissance is going to be incomplete without a good understanding of the two main influences on it, culturally: the Roman Empire, among whose ruins the Italians built, and the Greek scholars who came over from Byzantium and re-pollinated Italy with Greek learning. To understand the political aspirations of the leaders of these city-states, he needs to understand Roman political theory. I can't think of any good secondary sources for this (look for works about Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, etc. or any analysis of Roman history as a genre) off the top of my head, but it's another area of understanding that will be very important, especially in the first fifty pages (?!?!) that he will have to write.

You're also going to need a good grounding in the way the Catholic Church influenced the interactions between the states, including how the canon law of the day put together things like interdiction, inquisitions, etc. which were used by politically powerful Italian families against each other. So he's going to have bone up on his theology as well since the metaphysical justifications for these things were (arguably) important.

Does he already have a thesis for this book? If he already has a feel for the history and climate of the times and a general idea of where he is going, it will be much easier to have real experts— reference librarians (go to small liberal arts college's library), professors, or whoever— be able to recommend specific books. He should also, for something this long, be adopting a specific theoretical framework for how these processes work.
posted by Electrius at 3:11 PM on July 3, 2009

He's not quite at the thesis or theory levels yet. He chose his topic at the end of his freshman year, which was about a month ago. He goes to a Catholic school, so he has a pretty decent grounding in theology. Thanks for the recommendations about Roman and Byzantine scholars, I hadn't even considered that.
posted by nickhb at 3:20 PM on July 3, 2009

Just to pipe up again, it's going to be hard to focus his research without a question to answer. What questions does he want to answer? What does he want to know? There are so many places he could go here...

On the one hand, if he was examining (for example) how Important Renaissance Family X rose to prominence, sort of biographically, and through that examined all the other bits and bobs of the era - the politics, the Church, the patronage of art, the rise of the banking system, the influence of the Byzantine and Islamic scholars, etc., then he'd be able to focus on those subjects more narrowly - as they affected the family - and perhaps would have an easier time sifting through the tons of research and work about the period.

Or if he examined a more narrow social, cultural, or economic perspective of the era, like how the rise in demand for Unusual Commodity X affected Previously-Little-Known City-state Y with Important Consequence Z which led to..., or how Industrial Process A affected the political fortunes of Local Power B because he had a 200-year-old deal with suppliers of some part needed for Now Obsolete Industrial Process C, then it's more of a story, and various threads of the Renaissance as a whole can be woven into that. He'd cover many of the bases of the cities' interactions without having to reinvent the wheel as it were.

The first thing I thought of here was to have him look at books like Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded or A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. These are well-regarded books that tell a great story about important events in history but are enjoyable to read because they shower the reader with amazing details, background information, and fill in the whole picture of an era; it's the polar opposite of facts-and-figures blandness.

Whatever happens, this whole process of research, drafting, scrapping, paring down, beefing up, editing, and hashing out will make him into a better writer, and will prepare him really well for college. Good luck to him!
posted by mdonley at 4:36 PM on July 3, 2009

I'll start out by saying this is a hell of a project for a high school student, and it must be one hell of an accelerated program. I would have to guess that his teacher wouldn't throw him into this project on his own. Did the assignment come with some kind of research syllabus or schedule?

That would be my first instinctive move, to have him go to his adviser or advisers, if they're available. Otherwise, the school librarian.

I'd like to give more advice, but I'm just trying to wrap my head around the situation. Has he written comparable research papers in the past?
posted by Busoni at 4:58 PM on July 3, 2009

Let me say three things, just to get him started.

1. In case his adviser hasn't told him this already, the way to start these kind of papers is to do a quick search in the library catalog for the subject, go to the shelf, pull out a bunch of books, flip to the back for the bibliography for each of them, and see which titles of books and articles keep cropping up. These will be the definitive and authoritative works in the subject.

Then, he can start with these works, skimming through them, looking at the table of contents, and seeing what issues are at stake. Also, a search through ProQuest or LexisNexis or the like will produce articles that can be read quickly. Also, a read through an encyclopedia article, just to get background (not to cite).

2. To repeat what someone else has said: at some point, he's going to have to formulate some sort of thesis question to answer. Because let me say, and excuse my language, but the Italian Renaissance is a Big Fucking Subject. He might think 200 pages is a lot of pages to fill, but he's still going to have to focus his research in some way at some point (sooner than later), or he's not going to know where to spend his energy.

3. I'll say this again, though: 200 pages is a lot for even undergraduates, and definitely for high school students. I'd advise him to seek guidance from a professional, i.e., his adviser or a librarian, or preferably both.
posted by Busoni at 5:14 PM on July 3, 2009

Giovanni Arrighi wrote about the rise of the Italian city-states' commercial hegemony in his Long Twentieth Century (bottom of p.36 and ff), following Braudel.
posted by Abiezer at 6:44 PM on July 3, 2009

One more thing, he should ask to see completed projects done by graduating students. Ideally he'd see some fantastic projects and some perfectly fine projects. It's possible, especially if he's a good and diligent student, that he's overestimating the scope and quality required of the project. This is a classic grad student mistake, thinking that a thesis has to be one's opus. He may be doing the same thing. Get some examples. And maybe talk to the people who produced those examples about how they did it.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:03 PM on July 3, 2009

He might want to flip though the appropriate New Cambridge Modern Histories to get some feel for it.

Daniel Waley's Italian City Republics
posted by IndigoJones at 7:51 PM on July 3, 2009

Two hundred pages is much longer than a typical M.A. thesis in history, and I could imagine accepting a 200-page Ph.D. dissertation on the subject if it were written succinctly. What program is this? The assignment seems daft for a high school student, unless the 200 pages comprise a portfolio with several short papers, source analyses, etc.

That said, a good place to start investigating the subject is Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy. A more advanced book that goes deeper into the medieval background is P. J. Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria. Denys Hay's textbook on Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries is also useful, though it doesn't have the clear focus of Martines and Jones. Those books give an overview of the issues. The details could lead in any number of directions. Garrett Mattingly's Renaissance Diplomacy, a classic, is still useful on international relations and the development of a permanent diplomatic corps. Much of the useful scholarship is, not surprisingly, written in Italian by Italian historians.

Pretty soon you'll need to get into primary sources. Does your brother read Latin or Italian? If not, he's going to be constrained by what is available in English translation (a small fraction, though there are collections such as The Earthly Republic, and series like the I Tatti Renaissance Library, that have useful material in translation).

Pace Electrius, the Byzantine influence on city-states is often overstated. The Roman heritage (as understood by Renaissance thinkers) was much more important than the Greek heritage, despite the latter's importance to the most learned humanists. Pierre Bayle (late 17th century), and following him, Voltaire, made the fall of Constantinople (1453) responsible for the rise of learning in the Renaissance. Though completely false (the revival of Greek studies in northern Italy dates to Manuel Chrysoloras's residence in Florence at the beginning of the 15th century, along with Venetian contacts with their Greek possessions in the eastern Mediterranean), that belief has been persistent. Tony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, in From Humanism to the Humanities, have a useful assessment of Greek studies in the 15th century. The basic social and political structure of the city states was pretty well established by the end of the 14th century; if anything, they declined in favor of larger-scale political structures over the course of the 15th and early 16th centuries (see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries).

And, by the way, there's an important state missing from the list (Rome--i.e. the Papal States--, Florence, Venice, and Milan). That's Naples. You can't understand Renaissance politics without figuring in Naples, including the French claim to the kingdom. The latter leads, in 1494, to Charles VIII of France's invasion of Italy and the calamities that follow. Not to mention the fact that Alfonso, the mid-15th century Aragonese king of Naples, was a patron of scholarship and the arts.

Again, the whole enterprise seems daft, at least according to your description. I wish your brother luck! Probably the best place to start, after Martines, Jones, and Hay, is the American Historical Association Guide to Historical Literature (3rd ed., 1995, 2 vols.), which has a useful annotated bibliography. It certainly will give a good sense of how daunting a scope this is and how necessary it will be to refine and narrow the topic if the paper is not to be merely a lengthy encyclopedia article.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:12 PM on July 3, 2009

I knew one day my degree in Medieval History would pay off.

I suggest the Short Oxford series, edited by David Abulafia, one of the most well-known historians of Medieval Italy, and John Najemy. Both of these historians also have other books on the topic. IIRC Najemy has at least one on Florence.
posted by canadia at 8:17 PM on July 3, 2009

Sorry, Abulafia's link should be: http://www.amazon.com/Italy-Central-Middle-Ages-1000-1300/dp/0199247048/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246677472&sr=8-14
posted by canadia at 8:18 PM on July 3, 2009