The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence [Hardcover]

The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years.This book offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years. Florence was the epicenter of the culture produced during the Italian Renaissance, and the humanist movement underlay the style of the city's visual and literary arts. Brian Jeffrey Maxson demonstrates that the Renaissance in Florence was a far more popular movement than is usually assumed, spearheaded by scholars as well as wealthy citizens who dabbled in the reading of ancient texts and modern treatises translated from Latin into the vernacular. Indeed, only a fraction of the humanist club could read and write Latin, but these learned readers were usually the only people in cities like Florence with enough social status to put the ideas of civic humanism into practice. Maxson shows how this network of humanists enabled the launch of a cultural movement that established Florence as the preeminent center of learning in Italy and that spread beyond Italy to the rest of Europe.This book offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years. Florence was the epicenter of the culture produced during the Italian Renaissance, and the humanist movement underlay the style of the city's visual and literary arts. Brian Jeffrey Maxson demonstrates that the Renaissance in Florence was a far more popular movement than is usually assumed, spearheaded by scholars as well as wealthy citizens who dabbled in the reading of ancient texts and modern treatises translated from Latin into the vernacular. Indeed, only a fraction of the humanist club could read and write Latin, but these learned readers were usually the only people in cities like Florence with enough social status to put the ideas of civic humanism into practice. Maxson shows how thls‚