Ann Moyer publishes "The Intellectual World of Sixteenth-Century Florence: Humanists and Culture in the Age of Cosimo I"

Cover Art for The Intellectual World of 16th-Century Florence

Ann Moyer has recently published The Intellectual World of Sixteenth-Century Florence: Humanists and Culture in the Age of Cosimo I

(Cambridge University Press, 2020)

 

By the sixteenth century, Florence was famous across Europe for its achievements in the arts, letters, and humanist learning. Its intellectual life flourished anew at midcentury with Duke Cosimo and the Accademia Fiorentina. In this study, Ann Moyer provides an overview of Florentine intellectual life and community in the late Renaissance. She shows how studies of language helped Florentines develop their own story as a people distinct from ancient Greece or Rome, trace the rise of the city's medieval government, and explore how the city evolved into a hospitable environment for letters and the arts. Studies of Florentine art gave rise to art history, while those devoted to Florentine traditions and customs inspired broader questions about how to think about cultural change. Demonstrating how the intellectual activity around language, history, and art related and supported each other, Moyer's book documents the origins of the modern narrative of the Renaissance itself.

 

  • Provides overview of intellectual life and community in 16th-c Florence
  • Shows how the studies of language, history, and art related and supported each other in later Renaissance
  • Helps locate the arguments about the nature of the Renaissance in the era of the Renaissance itself