The Political and Social Uses of Dante in Fifteenth-Century Iberian Court Culture

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Elisha Hartnett
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Social Uses

The Swiss and their Neighbours, 1460-1560

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Scott
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Buffer Zone ◽  
The Political ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Political Principle ◽  
Mutual Obligation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Identity

Renewed interest in Swiss history has sought to overcome the old stereotypes of peasant liberty and republican exceptionalism. The heroic age of the Confederation in the fifteenth century is now seen as a turning point as the Swiss polity achieved a measure of institutional consolidation and stability, and began to mark out clear frontiers. This book questions both assumptions. It argues that the administration of the common lordships by the cantons collectively gave rise to as much discord as cooperation, and remained a pragmatic device not a political principle. It argues that the Swiss War of 1499 was an avoidable catastrophe, from which developed a modus vivendi between the Swiss and the Empire as the Rhine became a buffer zone, not a boundary. It then investigates the background to Bern’s conquest of the Vaud in 1536, under the guise of relieving Geneva from beleaguerment, to suggest that Bern’s actions were driven not by predeterminate territorial expansion but by the need to halt French designs upon Geneva and Savoy. The geopolitical balance of the Confederation was fundamentally altered by Bern’s acquisition of the Vaud and adjacent lands. Nevertheless, the political fabric of the Confederation, which had been tested to the brink during the Reformation, proved itself flexible enough to absorb such a major reorientation, not least because what held the Confederation together was not so much institutions as a sense of common identity and mutual obligation forged during the Burgundian Wars of the 1470s.

Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance Court Society*

1994 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 770-792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen S. Ettlinger
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Creation

Fifteenth Century Italy has been called both the “golden age of bastards” and the “age of golden bastards.” But while scholars from Jacob Burckhardt to Lauro Martines have decried princely infidelity and the political problems resulting from the promotion of the inevitable bastards, they have not discussed a central character in the creation of such situations: the mother of those bastards or, more properly, the mistress of the prince. “Golden bastards,” male and female, could not have existed without the tacit cooperation of noble women and the men who protected them – husbands, fathers, and brothers. And herein lies a conundrum. Paternal, spousal, and/or fraternal consent to an illicit relationship which was, at best, a tenuous claim on the generosity of a prince might appear to violate the model constructed by family historians of a society concerned with preserving the honor of their women in order to enhance the family's position through advantageous marital alliances of the virgin daughters.

The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Anthony Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The One ◽  
Original Approach

This chapter takes an original approach to Byron’s much-discussed engagement with the early Risorgimento by focusing not on biographical aspects, but rather on formal issues. It centres on The Two Foscari in the context of the highly politicised contemporary Italian critical debates about the dramatic unities. In this fashion, it teases out the political implications of Byron’s adherence to the unities by comparing his play to Alessandro Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola, which programmatically violates them. Focusing specifically on the playwrights’ representations of the fifteenth-century mercenary leader, Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola, the chapter explores these writers’ use or abuse of the unity of time, in particular. In doing so, it throws light on, and contrasts, Manzoni’s Risorgimento agenda on the one hand and Byron’s generally sceptical attitude about leadership and uncertainty about social and political change on the other.

The Literary and the Political in the Fifteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-80
Author(s):  
Pankaj Jha
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political History ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Regional Histories

Historians rarely write about the fifteenth century in north India. When they do, it is within certain set frames, for instance, as an interregnum, or as part of ‘regional’ histories. Occasionally, they write about the ferment of the bhakti ‘movement’ during the period. Tracing the narrow lanes of this historiography, the chapter also points to recent researches that raise some interesting questions. These relate to military labour, literary cultures, vernacularization, multilingualism, and so on. Apart from taking a critical stock of this historiography, the chapter explores how literary history might be fruitfully linked to ‘mainstream’ political history. It analyses meanings of, and the relationship between, literature, history, and power. Texts are not just innocent sources and repository of information. They are also seen as interventions in an ongoing conversation with other texts in the same and related themes and areas.

Leon Battista Alberti’s Porcaria coniuratio

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-112
Author(s):  
Marta Celati
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political View ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Stylistic Elements ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Shed Light

The second chapter focuses on Leon Battista Alberti’s Porcaria coniuratio, the historical epistle on Stefano Porcari’s conspiracy against pope Nicholas V written immediately after the thwarted plot in 1453. The political perspective underlying Alberti’s text does not reflect a merely propagandistic view, but conversely is the expression of a complex and ambiguous political reading of the events. The analysis aims to shed light on Alberti’s unsettled political view, by examining not only the ideological standpoint that emerges in the epistle, but also the rhetorical and stylistic elements that permeate this work. In particular, specific attention is paid to both the choice of the epistolary genre, which is employed to produce a historiographical work and is combined with other literary forms, and the studied use of various classical models (Sallust, satirical authors, Cicero, etc.). The examination of this text, which is read in connection with other works by Alberti, reveals the humanist’s view on historiography, which occupies a pivotal position in the lively fifteenth-century debate on historical writing. Moreover, the analysis shows how the complex rhetorical and stylistic framework of the Porcaria coniuratio implicitly conveys Alberti’s uneasy political thought, which proves to be completely distant from any sympathy with the plotter. Although the epistle is informed by a questioning approach, it reveals the humanist’s disapproval of any attempt at overthrowing established governments. It also betrays Alberti’s problematizing attitude towards political power and his unresolved view on the intricate Roman political background.

Nicholas of Modruš and HisDe Bellis Gothorum: Politics and National History in the Fifteenth-Century Adriatic

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-491
Author(s):  
Luka Špoljarić
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
National History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Proper Context

This article analyzes the “De Bellis Gothorum,” a long neglected and misunderstood history of the ancient Goths written in 1472–73 by Nicholas of Modruš, the leading Croatian-Illyrian bishop at the papal curia. By placing the work in its proper context, this article reconstructs a previously unknown episode in the political history of the fifteenth-century Adriatic. It is argued that the “De Bellis Gothorum” was in fact a national history that was meant to provide a trans-Adriatic network of Croatian and Bosnian nobles and churchmen with support from Naples and the papacy for their border wars against the Ottomans and reestablishment of their national kingdom.

The King's Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. L. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Formal Group ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Scene

The rise and fall of the house of York is a story which sits uneasily towards both revolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, in general, attempts to tidy away the political process of Lancastrian and Yorkist times into the displacement of one type of régime by another always fail to convince. They do so because as a régime neither Lancaster nor York kept still long enough to be impaled on a categorical definition. The political life and death of both dynasties composes the pattern, changing yet constant, of a set of variations on the theme of an aristocratic society pre-dominantly kingship-focused and centripetal rather than locality-focused and centrifugal. In so far as the political process conformed to the social order, the households of the great were the nodal connections in which relationships of mutual dependence cohered. Those retinues, fellowships, affinities (for the vocabulary of the time was rich in terms overlapping but with nuances of descriptive emphasis) have now been studied both in their general conformation and in several particular instances; I have here attempted for the central affinity of the king over one generation not a formal group portrait but a sketch focused on the middle distance of figures in a landscape. The meagreness of household records in the strict sense is a problem we must learn to live with. But it would seem sensible to make a virtue of necessity and follow the life-line of what evidence there is to the conclusion that if an understanding of the household is only possible by attending to its wider context, so an understanding of that wider political scene requires some attention to the household.

The Political Significance of Religious Wealth in Burmese History: Some Further Thoughts

1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor B. Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Political

This article examines the recent assertion by a scholar of Burmese history that extensive landholding by the Buddhist monkhood helped to undermine every dynasty between the ninth and nineteenth century. It argues that religious wealth, possibly before the fifteenth century and certainly after that period, was less significant than has been suggested, and that the institutional relation between throne and monkhood was by no means static. During the later dynasties, secular elites represented the principal threat to the centralization of resources. Further, in certain instances, royal purification of the Religion sought not to deprive the monkhood of wealth, but to strengthen both the Religion and the crown at the expense of private lay interests.

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