Chapter 2 describes how Roman and medieval of notions of imperium were re-appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe the sovereignty claims of nascent states as well as to legitimize their territorial aggrandizement in Europe and beyond. Since early modern conceptions of sovereignty came with few restrictions on the scope of rule in terms of peoples or places that could be legitimately subjected to its authority, early modern authors made no categorical distinction between empires and states. But even if these authors had no clear conception of a distinctive international realm, they nevertheless developed a rich vocabulary for describing relations between different polities in and out of Europe. Many of those who resisted imperial aggrandizement during this period maintained that the quest for universal sovereignty violated the natural liberty of both individuals and states and proposed that upholding the balance of power between European empires cum states was crucial to the preservation of natural liberty. From this Enlightenment historians and lawyers concluded that European powers constituted a system of sovereign and formally equal states held together by public law and balance of power in equal measures.

Monteverdi’s relationship with Torquato Tasso (1544–95) is typically associated with the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624; pub. Eighth Book, 1638): a spectacular musical scena drawn from Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata, in which the crusader knight Tancredi battles the Saracen heroine Clorinda. But Monteverdi’s introduction to the musical possibilities of the Gerusalemme began decades before, just as his experiments with the musical lament long predated the opera Arianna (1608). This chapter examines Monteverdi’s earliest settings of Tasso’s epic – the lamentations of Tancredi and Armida in the Third Book (1592) – as musical representations of lament through not the verisimilitude of opera but rather the artifice of five-voice madrigals. Monteverdi’s initial engagement with Tasso’s Gerusalemme catalysed the composer’s early experiments with the musical lament, a topos that occupied an important space both in opera and in madrigals.

Machiavellis attack on the civic humanism of Leonardo Bruni reveals Bruni to be a substantial opponent.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives – in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizses Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

High rates of interpersonal violence in Renaissance Italy were not signs of backwardness, requiring repression in order for the conditions of modernity to be set: quite the opposite. Italy, the most economically advanced and urbanised region of Europe, was the first to experience the negative consequences of social mobility and social differentiation. Notaries, accountants and lawyers were not modern bureaucratic functionaries. In order to be accepted as gentlemen they also had to act like gentlemen. The creation of a more amorphous social elite forced Italians to rethink the rules regulating social conduct, codifying the laws of civility and the duel, and elaborating the art of peacemaking. None of this stopped the violence however. Renaissance ideals of glory triumphed over the pious trappings of chivalry. Fighting was liberating, permitting any man, whatever his status, to win fame. Duelling became endemic, a corollary to and consequence of vendetta. The rest of this chapter outlines the contours of the new Renaissance masculine culture.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book. The erosion of medieval hierarchies and systems of mediation made competition for material resources and status rivalries more intense after 1500. Enmity is rooted in a sense of injustice and there was a growth in distrust between those who gained from and those who lost out to the burgeoning of state power. The law shaped enmity and mediated violence, but it did not repress them altogether. Enmity was a major threat to public order because its scale and intensity was related to the struggle for social and political capital. Most significant in generating the rise in elite violence was social change and the development of a caste code in which retaliation was seen as socially acceptable and politically necessary. The social elite were the most avid consumers of the law, and they used the courts alongside violence to uphold their honour and enforce their rights: rising rates of litigation in the sixteenth century were part of the same process of contention as rising rates of homicide. And just as violence declined in the eighteenth century, so did rates of litigation. The law promoted arbitration and reconciliation at every stage of the process. But the desire of the parties to fulfil their obligations and make use of the myriad institutions of mediation was dependent on social and political circumstance.

The Introduction outlines the historigraphical, conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the work. The concept of enmity allows us to rethink some common assumptions about the emergence of the European state, the law, violence and innate emotions. I am concerned with real people and their experience. Enmity is rooted in the ubiquitous nature of competition and rivalry between individuals and groups. Enmity is distinguished by the intensification of antagonism in which another group or person is perceived as threatening and must be countered by force. It is a relationship legitimised by a narrative which seeks to demonise the other, who is characterised as evil or subversive or a threat to one’s existence. The movement is not all one-way. We can make allies out of enemies or return to a healthy sense of rivalry. Enmity represents a particular threat to democracy whose flourishing relies on a healthy civil society and sense of social trust. In the period 1500-1700 the distinction between public and private enemies was more blurred than it is today because of the frequency of civil conflict. The transformation of social relations in the West was not the culmination of an ineluctable process, either of state formation or of the repression of instinct.

This chapter begins by exploring the problems of defining ‘literature’ and establishes the capacious and intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of its study. The body of the essay argues for the long-standing proximity of history and literature and the difficulties, and even undesirability, of disaggregating their underpinning skills and techniques. It focuses primarily on examples from the late sixteenth century: a period when ‘literature’ meant not ‘fiction’ or ‘creative writing’ but a more general ‘familiarity with letters or books’ and the ‘knowledge acquired from reading or studying them’ (OED), and a time when notions of both poetry and history were fluid. If the former skirts close to rhetoric (as in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c.1582)), the latter frequently connotes ‘story’, rather sequence of ‘factual’ events, as in Thomas Lodge’s often fantastical ‘history’ of ‘Robert, second duke of Normandy’ (1591). Even when endeavouring to adhere to the historical record, early modern, humanistically-trained historians – following their classical forebears – adopt fictive techniques, especially prosopopoeia: a ‘figure […] that to stirre and moove affection, attributeth speech to dead men, or to wals & such like’. School-room exercises drilled sixteenth-century pupils in this practice of personation, teaching them to ventriloquise the dead. As the essay goes on to demonstrate, prosopopoeia is particular useful when giving voice to those ‘overskipped’ by history, as seen from its centrality to The Mirror for Magistrates (William Baldwin et al.; editions from 1559) – a work which reflects self-consciously on the partiality of the historical record – and its use (alongside other fictive devices) by twenty-first-century historians and biographers seeking to restore voices lost or marginalised for reasons of race, class, or gender. The final section of the essay looks at how texts are shaped by their historical context (and vice versa) and the challenges of reading texts historically.

Chapter 1, ‘Of Scholars and Miners’, introduces the discipline of subterranean geometry from the point of view of Renaissance scholars. Early modern humanists were fascinated by the underground world of metal mines. The richness of the geometrical thinking contained in Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) or Erasmus Reinhold’s On Surveying (1574) is presented. By comparing them with actual productions of contemporary mine surveyors, I further show that these books, despite their lifelike descriptions and illustrations, did not limit themselves to straightforward, faithful depictions of actual practices. Early modern readers were presented with rational reconstructions and pseudo-technical procedures. In spite of a thorough knowledge and a genuine interest for the underground world, scholars mainly used their writings on mines in a patronage context, or to display their interpretation of Euclidean geometry.

On a cultural level, the Italian Renaissance lifted Europe into a new era of humanism that glorified humanity and shifted attention to the present needs and desires of people. Erasmus translated this humanistic attitude into scholarly pursuits that revealed the frailties and needs of the human authors of Scripture. All of these forces eroded the authority of the Church, leading to dramatic confrontation, both from inside and outside the Church. The Protestant Reformation took advantage of the rift between Christian monarchs and the papacy, successfully fragmenting the unity of Western Christendom. However, it was Copernicus who used the strategy and tools of reasoned arguments to arrive at his heliocentric theory of planetary motion. This bold assertion successfully demonstrated a truth arrived at through reason that differed from the conclusion supported by the authority of the Church. As a result, reason triumphed over faith, and the age of science began. While psychology remained obscured within philosophy and religion during this time, the enduring questions still perplexed scholars and were about to be addressed directly over two centuries of philosophical inquiries prior to psychology’s formal definition as a distinct science.

This chapter discusses an underexplored and relatively unappreciated, but essential, aspect of Samuel Johnson’s writing and thinking: his intellectual relationship with Renaissance humanism. Looking at representative figures such as Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and Michel de Montaigne, Lee explores the influence these writers and thinkers had upon Johnson, describing his lifelong interest in the kinds of scholarly works for which they were known (dictionary, scholarly edition, biography, satire, skeptical essay) and also detecting their presence in Johnson’s moral and philosophical commitment to an “active” life, and even in his very prose style. In so doing so, the chapter concludes that Johnson embraced Renaissance humanism while simultaneously adapting it into a project relevant and responsive to the demands of his own day and age – and, indeed, suggesting a model for our own potential humanism today.

This concluding chapter describes the inevitability of ambiguity among everyone affected by the Reformation. It reviews historiographical trends of research since the 1970s in intellectual and social history. Comparing these trends to the benefits and shortcomings of the “confessionalization thesis,” it argues for reconsideration of the idea of third forces, adapting a concept suggested by the Austrian medievalist and public intellectual Friedrich Heer and the French Renaissance historian Thierry Wanegffelen. It finally explains how the power of third forces describes the specific hybridity of the Reformation.