[PDF] The Florentine Mourners eBook

Author : George Herman
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 34,94 MB
Release : 1999-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1583486275

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A Renaissance mystery featuring Leonardo da Vinci and his companion, Niccolo da Pavia, as they join together in Florence to solve the mystery of two assassinations and widespread vandalisms of artworks involving the Borgias and the exiled Medici family. (Third of a series)

Author : Sharon T. Strocchia
Publisher :
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 22,31 MB
Release : 1992
Category : History
ISBN :

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In what ways did the rituals associated with death in Renaissance Florence serve as an indicator of how Florentine society saw itself? In Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, Sharon Strocchia shows how these death rites - especially civic funerals - reflected Florence's quick rise to commercial wealth in the fourteenth century and steady progression toward displays of princely power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Strocchia begins by examining the basic components of civic funerary rites and their symbolic meaning. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she then traces the changes and continuities of these rites throughout the Renaissance. She shows how the rise of funeral pomp in the late fourteenth century as linked to social mobility, the redistribution of wealth, corporate politics, and the psychology of the post-plague decades. She analyses the impact of "elitism, statism, and civism" on civic and family rites after 1400 and charts the social effects of rising assumption trends. And she focuses on the complex cycles of change stemming from the establishment and rejection Medici control, which by entrenching patrician domination helped pave the way for the Medici principate. "Rather than simply recasting the traditional history of the city", Strocchia writes, "the history of death rites shows us the sheer intricacy of how ritual and society defined each other. These episodes point us toward culture in action: the tangled, dense, and decidedly unstable relations binding family and state, gender and politics, word and image".

Author : Brandy Schillace
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 37,97 MB
Release : 2016-01-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1681770938

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Death is something we all confront—it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances.We are living at a unique point in human history. People are living longer than ever, yet the longer we live, the more taboo and alien our mortality becomes. Yet we, and our loved ones, still remain mortal. People today still struggle with this fact, as we have done throughout our entire history. What led us to this point? What drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar?Schillace shows how talking about death, and the rituals associated with it, can help provide answers. It also brings us closer together—conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal much about the present—and about ourselves.

Author : Christobel Kent
Publisher : Atlantic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 32,82 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Architects
ISBN : 9781843549482

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This book introduces Sandro Cellini, ex-cop and private detective, Florence's answer to Donna Leon's 'Guido Brunetti'. One wet November in Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband and disgraced ex-policeman, to ask him to investigate her husband's suicide.

Author : Katherine Ashenburg
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 13,38 MB
Release : 2010-01-12
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 0307398706

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There is no doubt that the death of a loved one has a profound - and unpredictable - effect on the lives of those left behind. Mourning is the price we pay for love. But how does anyone survive those first weeks, months, and even years after a death, and then eventually return to normal life? When her daughter's fiancé died suddenly, Katherine Ashenburg found herself drawn into the world of mourning customs. Finding little comfort in the stripped-down North American approach, she sought solace, and shaped the core of this much-praised book, by exploring the rich traditions that have sustained mourners in cultures around the world and across centuries. Intertwining anecdotes from past and present with her own story, Ashenburg uncovers the wisdom and creativity embedded in mourning rituals and their value in rebuilding those unravelled by loss. Somehow, as Ashenburg so deftly reveals, we find strength and go on living. With a new afterword by the author.

Author : Judith Testa
Publisher : Northern Illinois University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 32,6 MB
Release : 2012-09-15
Category : Travel
ISBN : 1501756745

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No city but Florence contains such an intense concentration of art produced in such a short span of time. The sheer number and proximity of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence can be so overwhelming that Florentine hospitals treat hundreds of visitors each year for symptoms brought on by trying to see them all, an illness famously identified with the French author Stendhal. While most guidebooks offer only brief descriptions of a large number of works, with little discussion of the historical background, Judith Testa gives a fresh perspective on the rich and brilliant art of the Florentine Renaissance in An Art Lover's Guide to Florence. Concentrating on a number of the greatest works, by such masters as Botticelli and Michelangelo, Testa explains each piece in terms of what it meant to the people who produced it and for whom they made it, deftly treating the complex interplay of politics, sex, and religion that were involved in the creation of those works. With Testa as a guide, armchair travelers and tourists alike will delight in the fascinating world of Florentine art and history.

Author : Jennifer Rushworth
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 21,46 MB
Release : 2016-11-17
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0192508288

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This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust. Each of these authors, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief. In Jennifer Rushworth's analysis, discourses of mourning emerge as caught between the twin, conflicting demands of a comforting, readable, shared generality and a silent, solitary respect for the uniqueness of any and every experience of loss. Rushworth explores a variety of major questions in the book, including: what type of language is appropriate to mourning? What effect does mourning have on language? Why and how has the Orpheus myth been so influential on discourses of mourning across different time periods and languages? Might the form of mourning described in a text and the form of closure achieved by that same text be mutually formative and sustaining? In this way, discussion of the literary representation of mourning extends to embrace topics such as the medieval sin of acedia, the proper name, memory, literary epiphanies, the image of the book, and the concept of writing as promise. In addition to the three primary authors, Rushworth draws extensively on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. These rich and diverse psychoanalytical and French theoretical traditions provide terminological nuance and frameworks for comparison, particularly in relation to the complex term melancholia.

Author : Carol Lansing
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 14,6 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780801440625

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The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.