This book is the first comprehensive study of images of rape in Italian painting at the dawn of the Renaissance. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Péter Bokody examines depictions of sexual violence in religion, law, medicine, literature, politics, and history writing produced in kingdoms (Sicily and Naples) and city-republics (Florence, Siena, Lucca, Bologna and Padua). Whilst misogynistic endorsement characterized many of these visual discourses, some urban communities condemned rape in their propaganda against tyranny. Such representations of rape often link gender and aggression to war, abduction, sodomy, prostitution, pregnancy, and suicide. Bokody also traces how the new naturalism in painting, introduced by Giotto, increased verisimilitude, but also fostered imagery that coupled eroticism and violation. Exploring images and texts that have long been overlooked, Bokody's study provides new insights at the intersection of gender, policy, and visual culture, with evident relevance to our contemporary condition.

This work explores the use of a time chart based on generations as a way to understand history. A sole reliance on yearly dating tends to obscure the historical reality and deter us from further exploration. However, patterns are revealed if we number generations, and we become intrigued by the connections and hypotheses raised. The author uses 15-year intervals to date events and mark when people turn 30 and tend to enter history. The 15-year generational interval was first used by the medieval historian, Bede, and later advocated by Ortega E Gasset, a leading Spanish philosopher of the 20th century. In brief, the phases of history found are: 1) A partly invisible beginning phase; 0-15 generations; 2) An establishment phase at 15/20 generations; 3) A consolidating and opening up stage at 30 generations; 4) A crisis and creativity phase at 40 generations; 5) An empire and inclusionary phase at 50 generations; and 6) Renewal or rigidification phase at the 60 generational node. Importantly, special attention is given to the often neglected 30th generational period, in which an openess to beauty and light prevade. Interestingly, these phases also resonate with the human life cycle. The tour of cultures covered includes ancient Egypt, Israel-Judah, Rome, and the Medieval-Modern. Taking us into contemporary times, America/United States is addressed in a second volume to this work.You are invited to go on an intriguing journey in which generational patterning becomes a Rosetta key for understanding history.

Special issue focusing on violence in fifteenth-century life, text, and image: warfare and justice, violence in family and milieu (court, town, village, and forest), hagiography, ethnicity and xenophobia, gender relations and sexual violence, brutality on the stage, and the relation of text and image in the depiction of violence.

This study is the first to examine the relationship between art and violence in 15th-century Florence, exposing the underbelly of a period more often celebrated for enlightened and progressive ideas. Renaissance Florentines were constantly subjected to the sight of violence, whether in carefully staged rituals of execution or images of the suffering inflicted on Christ. There was nothing new in this culture of pain, unlike the aesthetic of violence that developed towards the end of the 15th century. It emerged in the work of artists such as Piero di Cosimo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and the young Michelangelo. Inspired by the art of antiquity, they painted, engraved, and sculpted images of deadly battles, ultimately normalizing representations of brutal violence. Drawing on work in social and literary history, as well as art history, Scott Nethersole sheds light on the relationship between these Renaissance images, violence, and ideas of artistic invention and authorship.

One of the most brilliant courtiers and military leaders in Renaissance France, Jacques de Savoie, duke of Nemours, was head of the cadet branch of the house of Savoy, a dynasty that had ruled over a collection of lands in the Western Alps since the eleventh century. Jacques’ cousin Emanuel Filibert, duke of Savoy and ruler of the Sabaudian lands, fought against Jacques, and each expanded their influence at the other’s expense, while also benefitting from the other’s position. This study examines the complex and rich relationship of the noble cousins that spanned the battlefields, bedchambers, courts, and backrooms of taverns from Paris to Turin to the frontiers between the Genevois and Geneva. Each prince played key roles in sixteenth-century European politics due to their individual and dynastic identities. Jacques’ apanage of the Genevois was a virtual state-within-a-state, the institutional expression of a simultaneously competitive and cooperative relationship between two branches of a sovereign house. Here Matthew Vester provides a new picture of the nobility and of the European political landscape that moves beyond old views and taps into the unspoken cultural rules governing dynastic relations.

Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy explores the new directions being taken in the study of sex and gender in Italy from 1300 to 1700 and highlights the impact that recent scholarship has had in revealing innovative ways of approaching this subject. In this interdisciplinary volume, twelve scholars of history, literature, art history, and philosophy use a variety of both textual and visual sources to examine themes such as gender identities and dynamics, sexual transgression and sexual identities in leading Renaissance cities. It is divided into three sections, which work together to provide an overview of the influence of sex and gender in all aspects of Renaissance society from politics and religion to literature and art. Part I: Sex, Order, and Disorder deals with issues of law, religion, and violence in marital relationships; Part II: Sense and Sensuality in Sex and Gender considers gender in relation to the senses and emotions; and Part III: Visualizing Sexuality in Word and Image investigates gender, sexuality, and erotica in art and literature. Bringing to life this increasingly prominent area of historical study, Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy is ideal for students of Renaissance Italy and early modern gender and sexuality.

Many have wondered why the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers are so filled with violence, with murder and mayhem. This work explains how and why, putting the literature of the European Renaissance in the context of the history of violence. Personal violence was on the decline in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, but warfare became much deadlier and the stakes of war became much higher as the new nation-states vied for hegemony and the New World became a target of a shattering invasion. There are times when Renaissance writers seem to celebrate violence, but more commonly they anatomized it and were inclined to focus on victims as well as warriors on the horrors of violence as well as the need for force to protect national security and justice. In Renaissance writing, violence has lost its innocence.

A doubled-edged critical forum, this volume brings early modern culture and psychoanalysis into revisionist dialogue with each other. The authors reflect on how psychoanalysis remains "possessed" by its incorporation of early modern mythologies, vision, credos, and phantasms, which may--or may not--be applicable today. 23 photos.

Beasts and Beauties examines the relationship between domesticity and power by focusing on the contemporaneous development of the invention of the 'pet' and the delineation of the home as a uniquely private enclosure, where the pater familias ruled over his own secluded world of domesticated wife, children, servants, and animals.

The aim of this Companion volume is to provide scholars and advanced graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research work on Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies. Written by a team of international scholars and experts in the field, the chapters are grouped into two large areas of influence and intertextuality, corresponding to the dual way in which early modern England looked upon the Italian world from the English perspective – Part 1: "Italian literature and culture" and Part 2: "Appropriations and ideologies". In the first part, prominent Italian authors, artists, and thinkers are examined as a direct source of inspiration, imitation, and divergence. The variegated English response to the cultural, ideological, and political implications of pervasive Italian intertextuality, in interrelated aspects of artistic and generic production, is dealt with in the second part. Constructed on the basis of a largely interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers an in-depth and wide-ranging treatment of the multifaceted ways in which Italy’s material world and its iconologies are represented, appropriated, and exploited in the literary and cultural domain of early modern England. For this reason, contributors were asked to write essays that not only reflect current thinking but also point to directions for future research and scholarship, while a purposefully conceived bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a detailed index round off the volume.