This is as good a place as any to show a bit more of the method for this collection, again. Like glue still used in the production of actual physical books -- in order to bind covers with contents, for instance -- a newer running list of topics, subjects and titles is in order. Reviews or summaries, quotes and extracts still show up according to running chronologic topic, but less of the seams and immediate contexts, the bits of string that might hold them together. There just hasn't been the time.
A number of topics older for this blog have clearly been set aside rather than superseded. Wunderli's delightful book Peasant Fires was relatively easier to give a more comprehensive 'review' because of its relatively smaller size. But its scope is huge as it looks at beliefs and practices for the personal, the public, the economic, and within and without the universal church in southern German lands of the day. A number of other sources, however, simply tell longer stories that stretch across greater extents of time.
In certain ways, for instance, these sets of topic continue here, in following the high points of the Life of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, in Italy. After the readable and persuasive Lauro Martines (2006) in his Fire In The City , a shift in emphasis will follow predominantly from a different source. Martines is partly persuasive through the use of a kind of emotional appeal where serially displayed tides of multiple contexts are lain down, all tugging and twisting events by their interpretations, in a cascade of heightened dramatic tensions. They were tense times and Savonarola was in the middle of things. Donald Weinstein's recent (2011) updated biography on Savonarola also promises to be absorbing and supply a bit more detail.
Of course, Italy wasn't alone in rethinking priorities on how the Christian religion was implemented in Europe. The Devotio Moderna was a Dutch contribution that weighed heavily on the minds of Churches, churchmen and laity all over the north. A recent (1988) collection of that material will deepen those contexts and shed light on Reformations to come. The forcefulness of Spanish interpretations both in Spain and in Rome will continue to be sources for study.
As Columbus returned from his second voyage to the americas in the spring of 1496, another Italian Amerigo Vespucci, acting as executor to the estate of an Italian merchant named Giannotti Berardi who had died in Seville, fulfilled this man's contract with the Spanish crown for twelve more ships to be fitted out to explore the Indies. Despite such eventually accepted misnomers, knowledge of the routes east and south were already circulating in some circles, but elsewhere. Stories of other explorers had already been set down in Portugal and even Rome. Poggio Bracciolini returns here with a surprising bit of lively travelogue to the actual Far East, supplied by Nicolo de Conti, and placed gently in a dialogue On the Vicissitudes of Fortune (from 1447) that I feel fortunate to have found in translation.
The extended comparisons of eyewitnesses in that New World have also noticeably been left behind. The stories from the Aztecs, the Tlaxcala, the Letters of Hernan Cortes, the True History of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the life of La Malinche, as well as the Life of Columbus recede into the background as another story develops. Those are the stories of Imperial Spain and Portugal, as the expansion of delegated, but growing, governing bodies asserted themselves, and different narratives for them take shape. One of the central examples of these was being developed by the dual Crown of Castile and Aragon. Another was in Rome, with different popes asserting the rights and preferences for different sets of national interests through this same period.
Italy tried to recover from the ravages of war brought by France and the other partisans in the mid-1490's, but only had a couple years before the French would be at it again. Cardinal della Rovere's daughter Felice then would stay in Savona, near Genoa and be married, widowed and then housed in the Palazzo della Rovere there. Caterina Sforza would defiantly stay in Forli while brutally carrying out revenge or maintaining a hostile silence. Uncle Ludovico in Milan and Maximilian in Austria would try and fail to establish and maintain order in Italy, and fail similarly at home. Henry Tudor in England would try and succeed at keeping his distance from most of the rest of Europe's troubles, while chasing down and nullifying his chief rivals nearer to home.
All across Europe trouble never seemed to cease. When it did, there was healing to do and crops to be tended (too, and also disease and plague and poverty to suffer through as well). For Venice things never really did slow down as the seasons came and went. The wars to protect Pisa and Italy against the French turned into wars at sea and overseas which began again against the Turk. And then against, and then, with, the French again. Pietro Bembo would do his best to chronicle the list of captains and victories and losses and rewards as the century wound down.
To the East there remained some Byzantine holdouts as at Mt Athos or Methoni. Or at St Catherine's at Mt Sinai. Staying put as best they could. The huge lands united by King Corvinus in Hungary became wild and untempered under the distant nominal Habsburg rule of Maximilian. For awhile. A closer look at how persuasion could and even needed to affect even the mightiest of monarchs and benefactors, looms. As does the personalizing influence that new forms of study, preaching and communication gave rise to new interpretations and ways to view the self in this ever more widening world.
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