Regulating sense and space in late Renaissance Florence

This article examines the sounds and smells of late Renaissance Florence by analysing stone inscriptions posted in public streets and squares by the city's policing officials, the Otto di Guardia, during the Medici grand ducal period (1569–1737). The plaques contain sensory regulations prohibiting sounds, smells and sights considered socially and environmentally polluting. Unpublished archival records, printed materials and material artifacts reveal how sensory legislation developed as an increasingly public element of late Renaissance Florentine governance, while at the same time revealing how Florentines often resisted or ignored sensory regulation. Digitally mapping the sensory legislation plaques visualizes the intersections of sense, space and social history in new ways.

Walking in the Boboli Gardens in Florence: Toward a Transdisciplinary, Visual, Cultural, and Constellational Analyses of Medieval Sensibilities in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Walking as a methodological approach has developed within anthropological, literary, sociological, and ethnographic research, and more recently in ethno-biographic studies, but has not greatly crossed into history or art history. In this article, using the metaphor of the “constellation,” we offer a transdisciplinary methodology to complicate Euro-western renaissance humanism, in our exploration of the gendered, temporal, spatial, and cultural aspects of renaissance Florence, through a walk in the “Boboli gardens” in the footsteps of Poliphilo. Walking helps us to form a sense of our past, present, and future, and in walking, we gain ground in the “art of paying attention” (Ingold). In our walk, key emerging themes are the gardens as a metaphor for visual culture; the phenomenological, temporal, and spatial transgression of gender norms and their demarcated thresholds; gardens as stimulating cognition and the sensorial; and the developing art of garden aesthetics and the architectonic.

The Writing of Daily Life

This chapter argues that the growing importance of financial documentation in early modernity shaped the form and content of vernacular writing. Focusing on the diary, it traces links between journals and accounts from early Renaissance Florence through seventeenth-century England, showing how notebook culture spread in response to financial pressures. Ultimately, the extension of monetary relations in early capitalist England gave men and women new reasons to record apparently trivial details of their daily lives, which now appeared in lists of expenses, debts, and accounts. The chapter thus contributes to debates about English economic individualism and the origins of realist prose; in addition, it shows how practical documents served as a vector for transmitting financial imperatives to literary history.

Friendship, Uncertainty, and “Commonplacing” in Renaissance Florence

In fifteenth-century Florence, friendship—or the client–patron relationship, as contemporaries termed it—was often associated with uncertainties and risks. An investigation of diaries, notebooks, and letter correspondences of the time, from the perspective of game theory and decision theory, reveals how Florentines reasoned about the uncertainties of friendship, deploying an array of knowledge-constructing practices, under the rubric of “commonplacing,” to understand it. The preventive techniques that Florentines applied to cope with the conflicting testimonies of the contemporary information culture (the increase in the variety and the availability of vernacular texts, the expansion of literacy, etc.) only served to intensify their predicament. The fact that clients and patrons largely viewed their relationship in the same way challenges the traditional notion of that relationship as asymmetrical.