An illuminating study of early modern efforts to regulate sound in women’s residential institutions, and how the noises of city life—both within and beyond their walls—defied such regulation.

Amid the Catholic reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of women and girls housed in nunneries, reformatories, and charity homes grew rapidly throughout the city of Florence. Julia Rombough follows the efforts of legal, medical, and ecclesiastical authorities to govern enclosed women, and uncovers the experiences of the women themselves as they negotiated strict sensory regulations. At a moment when quiet was deeply entangled with ideals of feminine purity, bodily health, and spiritual discipline, those in power worked constantly to silence their charges and protect them from the urban din beyond institutional walls.

Yet the sounds of a raucous metropolis found their way inside. The noise of merchants hawking their wares, sex workers laboring and socializing with clients, youth playing games, and coaches rumbling through the streets could not be contained. Moreover, enclosed women themselves contributed to the urban soundscape. While some embraced the pursuit of silence and lodged regular complaints about noise, others broke the rules by laughing, shouting, singing, and conversing. Rombough argues that ongoing tensions between legal regimes of silence and the inevitable racket of everyday interactions made women’s institutions a flashpoint in larger debates about gender, class, health, and the regulation of urban life in late Renaissance Italy.

Attuned to the vibrant sounds of life behind walls of stone and sanction, A Veil of Silence illuminates a revealing history of early modern debates over the power of the senses.

A volume that offers a fresh perspective on the art of Venice and the Veneto region of Italy by focusing on the artistic idea of disegno.

Disengo (Italian for drawing or design) refers to the philosophical relationship between the conceptual role of design and the physical act of drawing. Venetian Disegno explores this theme and its history in the Veneto artistic landscape with contributions on myriad artists and art forms including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and architecture.

Divided into five thematic sections and sumptuously illustrated with over one hundred images, Venetian Disegno represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the art of Venice, Renaissance workshops, and drawing studies.

By the second decade of the fifteenth century Venice had established an empire in Italy extending from its lagoon base to the lakes, mountains, and valleys of the northwestern part of the peninsula. The wealthiest and most populous part of this empire was the city of Brescia which, together with its surrounding territory, lay in a key frontier zone between the politically powerful Milanese and the economically important Germans. Venetian governance there involved political compromise and some sensitivity to local concerns, and Brescians forged their distinctive civic identity alongside a strong Venetian cultural presence.

Based on archival, artistic, and architectural evidence, Stephen Bowd presents an innovative microhistory of a fascinating, yet historically neglected city. He shows how Brescian loyalty to Venice was repeatedly tested by a succession of disasters: assault by Milanese forces, economic downturn, demographic collapse, and occupation by French and Spanish armies intent on dismembering the Venetian empire. In spite of all these troubles the city experienced a cultural revival and a dramatic political transformation under Venetian rule, which Bowd describes and uses to illuminate the process of state formation in one of the most powerful regions of Renaissance Italy.

Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

“Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.”
—Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement

“Magisterial…Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way…For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be…nothing less than transformative.”
—Noel Malcolm, American Affairs

“[A] masterpiece…It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents…and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.”
—Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement

“The lessons for today are clear and profound.”
—Robert D. Kaplan

Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft.

A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.