Books in the Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture series

This volume of essays offers a series of insights into the 'age of the Enlightenment', not only in Italy but throughout Europe. In its political reforms, Naples was influenced by European culture. However, Naples also exercised a strong influence upon European culture and helped shape modern, enlightened European culture.

The book collects the best recent research on the important dominion that was created by the Republic of Florence in Tuscany during the Renaissance. The essays include studies of state-building, fiscal policy, and the personal and political relations of Florentines with the inhabitants of subject communities.

This 2000 volume was the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states during the early modern period. The discussion includes Venice, the Papal States, the duchy of Savoy, Florence, Mantua, Modena, and the kingdom of Naples.

A large number of Italian artists, singers, musicians and other performers travelled throughout Europe during the eighteenth century and made an important impact on taste and fashion. This multi-disciplinary 1999 book examines the importance of their influence outside Italy in locations as diverse as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna.

This 2002 book describes power and politics in Rome and the role of the papacy in early modern European politics. It attempts to overcome the traditional historiographical approach to the papacy during this period by focusing on the actual mechanisms of power in the papal court - political, personal, spiritual and ceremonial.

This 2000 volume was the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states during the early modern period. The discussion includes Venice, the Papal States, the duchy of Savoy, Florence, Mantua, Modena, and the kingdom of Naples.

Drawing upon a wealth of archival material, this 2001 book deals with one of the most controversial subjects in Italian historiography, namely the success or failure of the Church's policy during the counter-Reformation to exert rigorous control not just over theology but over all branches of knowledge.

This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building its future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. The author looks well beyond Braudel's influential picture of a Spanish-dominated Mediterranean world and sheds fresh light on Italy's gradual commercial decline.

This 2002 book describes power and politics in Rome and the role of the papacy in early modern European politics. It attempts to overcome the traditional historiographical approach to the papacy during this period by focusing on the actual mechanisms of power in the papal court - political, personal, spiritual and ceremonial.

A pioneering study of convent theatre in early modern Italy, an all-female dramatic tradition popular in its time but now virtually forgotten. It reveals much about convent authors, convent education, the high level of the nuns' literacy, and surprisingly close relationship between the convent and secular culture.

An examination of how lay religious confraternities in Italy shaped early ritual kinship. This 1999 book discusses how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This book is a major study in English of the duchy of Savoy during the period of the Thirty Years War, examining the varied and powerful dynastic aspirations of the House of Savoy through the career of its leading ambassador, Alessandro Scaglia (1592-1641).

This book deals with the crucial relationship between war and state formation in early modern Europe by examining the participation of Savoy in the Nine Years War (1688-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) under Duke Victor Amadeus II.

This volume of essays offers a series of insights into the 'age of the Enlightenment', not only in Italy but throughout Europe. In its political reforms, Naples was influenced by European culture. However, Naples also exercised a strong influence upon European culture and helped shape modern, enlightened European culture.

This volume of interdisciplinary essays explores the history and the diversity of the Italian garden from medieval times to the modern period, showing how different types of garden developed throughout the peninsula, depending on climate, situation and culture.

This book focuses on the behavior of the ruling families of Brescia, a rich and strategically vital city under Venetian rule, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

Political exiles were a prominent feature of political life in Renaissance Italy, often a source of intense concern to the states from which they were banished, and a ready instrument for governments wishing to intervene in the affairs of their rivals and enemies. This book, first published in 2000, provides a systematic analysis of the role of exiles in the political life of fifteenth-century Italy. The main focus is on the experiences and reactions of the exiles, and on how Italian states dealt with their own exiles and those of other powers. Siena, notorious in the 1480s for the numbers of her citizens in exile, is used as the model with which other cities are compared. Such a detailed study of the phenomenon of exile also provides alternative perspectives on the nature and power of governments in fifteenth-century Italy, and on ideas about the legitimacy of political authority and political action.

An examination of how lay religious confraternities in Italy shaped early ritual kinship. This 1999 book discusses how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A large number of Italian artists, singers, musicians and other performers travelled throughout Europe during the eighteenth century and made an important impact on taste and fashion. This multi-disciplinary 1999 book examines the importance of their influence outside Italy in locations as diverse as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna.

The book collects the best recent research on the important dominion that was created by the Republic of Florence in Tuscany during the Renaissance. The essays include studies of state-building, fiscal policy, and the personal and political relations of Florentines with the inhabitants of subject communities.

This 1995 book examines the confraternities, lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs. Intensely local and predominantly artisanal, the confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines and processions.

This is the first social and cultural study of the principal 'free' professions in Italy between unification and the First World War. It is a major contribution both to the history of the bourgeoisie in Italy and to our understanding of the developing role of professions in modern European society.

Numbers and Nationhood, first published in 1996, explores the role that statistics played in generating a national image of Italy in the nineteenth century. Silvana Patriarca's innovative study provides a fresh reading of Risorgimento Italy, bringing to the fore issues of science, ideology, and representation.

This book relates the history of Italian railways and their relation with the Italian state from the 1840s, when the first lines were constructed, until nationalization in 1905. During the nineteenth century and the process of unification, it is argued that railways had a pernicious and divisive influence on Italian political life.

This is the first social and cultural study of the principal 'free' professions in Italy between unification and the First World War. It is a major contribution both to the history of the bourgeoisie in Italy and to our understanding of the developing role of professions in modern European society.

This 1994 book provides a meticulous examination of the ideology, structure, and functions of papal police as they operated in the city and province of Bologna in the period before Italian unity, and in doing so offers an important new interpretation of the Risorgimento.

This book offers a new interpretation of what the Catholic Reform meant at local diocesan level in the face of attempts by Rome to regularise worship c.1550-1700.

This book is an extended study of a leading Italian Renaissance cardinal, offering a new vision of his lifestyle and activities. It challenges received opinion about the nature of political and ecclesiastical patronage and clientele systems, and offers new insights into the rivalry between the Medici and Soderini.

The court of Ercole d'Este was one of the most glittering in Renaissance Italy. This book re-establishes Ercole's originality and importance, and sheds light on some general aspects of artist/patron relations during the Renaissance.