Medici Women

Author : Natalie R. Tomas
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1351885839
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Medici Women written by Natalie R. Tomas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Medici Women is a study of the women of the famous Medici family of Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Natalie Tomas examines critically the changing contribution of the women in the Medici family to the eventual success of the Medici regime and their exercise of power within it; and contributes to our historical understanding of how women were able to wield power in late medieval and early modern Italy and Europe. Tomas takes a feminist approach that examines the experience of the Medici women within a critical framework of gender analysis, rather than biography. Using the relationship between gender and power as a vantage point, she analyzes the Medici women's uses of power and influence over time. She also analyzes the varied contemporary reactions to and representation of that power, and the manner in which the women's actions in the political sphere changed over the course of the century between republican and ducal rule (1434-1537). The narrative focuses especially on how women were able to exercise power, the constraints placed upon them, and how their gender intersected with the exercise of power and influence. Keeping the historiography to a minimum and explaining all unfamiliar Italian terms, Tomas makes her narrative clear and accessible to non-specialists; thus The Medici Women appeals to scholars of women's studies across disciplines and geographical boundaries.

Author : Judith C Brown
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780772721808
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medici Women written by Judith C Brown and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Gabrielle Langdon
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 0802038255
Total Pages : 457 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medici Women written by Gabrielle Langdon and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ducal court of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Florence was one of absolutist, rule-bound order. Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of propaganda to establish legitimacy and prestige for the new sixteenth-century Florentine court. In this engaging and original study, Gabrielle Langdon analyses selected portraits of women by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and other masters. She defines their function as works of art, as dynastic declarations, and as encoded documents of court culture and propaganda, illuminating Cosimo's conscious fashioning of his court portraiture in imitation of the great courts of Europe. Langdon explores the use of portraiture as a vehicle to express Medici political policy, such as with Cosimo's Hapsburg and Papal alliances in his bid to be made Grand Duke with hegemony over rival Italian princes. Stories from archives, letters, diaries, chronicles, and secret ambassadorial briefs, open up a world of fascinating, personalities, personal triumphs, human frailty, rumour, intrigue, and appalling tragedies. Lavishly illustrated, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.

Author : Yvonne Maguire
Publisher : New York : [s.n.]
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Women of the Medici written by Yvonne Maguire and published by New York : [s.n.]. This book was released on 1927 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Mark Strage
Publisher : New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women of Power written by Mark Strage and published by New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book was released on 1976 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Stefanie Solum
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351536494
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence " written by Stefanie Solum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de? Medici?s impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman?s contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family?s domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi?s Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi?s painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de? Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women?s agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

Author : Leonie Frieda
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0063235919
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Catherine de Medici written by Leonie Frieda and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the STARZ original series, The Serpent Queen, premiering September 11. “A beautifully written portrait of a ruthless, subtle and fearless woman fighting for survival and power in a world of gangsterish brutality, routine assassination and religious mania. . . . Frieda has brought a largely forgotten heroine-villainess and a whole sumptuously vicious era back to life. . . . This is The Godfather meets Elizabeth.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar Poisoner, besotted mother, despot, necromancer, engineer of a massacre: the dark legend of Catherine de Medici is centuries old. In this critically hailed biography, Leonie Frieda reclaims the story of this unjustly maligned queen of France to reveal a skilled ruler battling extraordinary political and personal odds. Based on comprehensive research including thousands of Catherine’s own letters, Frieda unfurls Catherine’s story from her troubled childhood in Florence to her tumultuous marriage to Henry II of France; her transformation of French culture to her reign as a queen who would use brutality to ensure her children’s royal birthright. Brilliantly executed, this enthralling biography goes beyond myth to paint a very human portrait of this remarkable figure.

Author : R J Knecht
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317896866
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Catherine de'Medici written by R J Knecht and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine de' Medici (1519-89) was the wife of one king of France and the mother of three more - the last, sorry representatives of the Valois, who had ruled France since 1328. She herself is of preeminent importance to French history, and one of the most controversial of all historical figures. Despised until she was powerful enough to be hated, she was, in her own lifetime and since, the subject of a "Black Legend" that has made her a favourite subject of historical novelists (most notably Alexandre Dumas, whose Reine Margot has recently had new currency on film). Yet there is no recent biography of her in English. This new study, by a leading scholar of Renaissance France, is a major event. Catherine, a neglected and insignificant member of the Florentine Medici, entered French history in 1533 when she married the son of Francis I for short-lived political reasons: her uncle was pope Clement VII, who died the following year. Now of no diplomatic value, Catherine was treated with contempt at the French court even after her husband's accession as Henry II in 1547. Even so, she gave him ten children before he was killed in a tournament in 1559. She was left with three young boys, who succeeded to the throne as Francis II (1559-60), Charles IX (1560-74) and Henry III (1574-89). As regent and queen-mother, a woman and with no natural power-base of her own, she faced impossible odds. France was accelerating into chaos, with political faction at court and religious conflict throughout the land. As the country disintegrated, Catherine's overriding concern was for the interests of her children. She was tireless in her efforts to protect her sons' inheritance, and to settle her daughters in advantageous marriages. But France needed more. Catherine herself was both peace-loving and, in an age of frenzied religious hatred, unbigoted. She tried to use the Huguenots to counterbalance the growing power of the ultra-Catholic Guises but extremism on all sides frustrated her. She was drawn into the violence. Her name is ineradicably associated with its culmination, the Massacre of St Bartholomew (24 August 1572), when thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and elsewhere. To this day no-one knows for certain whether Catherine instigated the massacre or not, but here Robert Knecht explores the probabilities in a notably level-headed fashion. His book is a gripping narrative in its own right. It offers both a lucid exposition of immensely complex events (with their profound imact on the future of France), and also a convincing portrait of its enigmatic central character. In going behind the familiar Black Legend, Professor Knecht does not make the mistake of whitewashing Catherine; but he shows how intractable was her world, and how shifty or intransigent the people with whom she had to deal. For all her flaws, she emerges as a more sympathetic - and, in her pragmatism, more modern - figure than most of her leading contemporaries.

Author : Richard Stapleford
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 027105641X
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lorenzo De' Medici at Home written by Richard Stapleford and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An inventory of the private possessions of Lorenzo il Magnifico de' Medici, head of the ruling Medici family during the apogee of the Florentine Renaissance"--Provided by publisher.

Author : Caroline P. Murphy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198042906
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Murder of a Medici Princess written by Caroline P. Murphy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-18 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany. Murphy is a superb storyteller, and her fast-paced narrative captures the intrigue, the scandal, the romantic affairs, and the violence that were commonplace in the Florentine court. She brings to life an extraordinary woman, fluent in five languages, a free-spirited patron of the arts, a daredevil, a practical joker, and a passionate lover. Isabella, in fact, conducted numerous affairs, including a ten-year relationship with the cousin of her violent and possessive husband. Her permissive lifestyle, however, came to an end upon the death of her father, who was succeeded by her disapproving older brother Francesco. Considering Isabella's ways to be licentious and a disgrace upon the family, he permitted her increasingly enraged husband to murder her in a remote Medici villa. To tell this dramatic story, Murphy draws on a vast trove of newly discovered and unpublished documents, ranging from Isabella's own letters, to the loose-tongued dispatches of ambassadors to Florence, to contemporary descriptions of the opulent parties and balls, salons and hunts in which Isabella and her associates participated. Murphy resurrects the exciting atmosphere of Renaissance Florence, weaving Isabella's beloved city into her story, evoking the intellectual and artistic community that thrived during her time. Palaces and gardens in the city become places of creativity and intrigue, sites of seduction, and grounds for betrayal. Here then is a narrative of compelling and epic proportions, magnificent and alluring, decadent and ultimately tragic.