The best books that explore what Renaissance Italy was really like

This book, more than any other, inspired me to become a historian of Renaissance Italy.

Richard Trexler reveals that, far from being secular minded, the inhabitants of Florence relied on religion, ritual behavior, and charisma to create and maintain urban life, social values, and civic order.

By turns anthropological as well as historical, Trexler uncovers the ritual behaviors and practices that tied the city together from the level of the cosmos to the everyday relations between friends, neighbors, and family members. The central purpose of all public ritual in Florence served to overcome the inherent weakness of a republican government in a world of gods and kings. 

This was another book that really inspired my choice of profession. Located in the northeast corner of the Italian peninsula, Friuli emerges as something like the wild west of Renaissance Italy in this engrossing study.

Far removed from the urbane cities and courts and the worlds of art and literature commonly associated with the Renaissance, Edward Muir reveals the continuing binds of feudal obligation, family, vengeance, and honor, and the violence they provoked in the early sixteenth century. Incidentally, the history he tells also encounters the real-life origins of the story that would become Romeo and Juliet.

Like Trexler, Muir explores the power of ritual in Renaissance Italian life, but rather than rituals of community and government, he focuses in this book on the rituals of aversion and violence.

Alessandro de’ Medici was the first member of his famous family to rule the city of Florence as a titled prince. He was also, possibly, the first person of African descent to rule a European state.

Illegitimately born, his father was a Medici duke, and his mother may have been an enslaved African. In this highly readable book, Catherine Fletcher uses meticulous archival research to present the most detailed account of the life of Alessandro yet produced.

The book examines the glittering excesses of court life in sixteenth-century Florence and Rome, and the intrigues and jealousies behind this façade, while recovering the life of a previously obscure figure. Examining a time and place I know well, I found this an engaging story, well told.

This book presents six vignettes of sex and violence plucked by Thomas Cohen from the archives of the papal governor of sixteenth-century Rome.

I love Cohen’s passion for telling a good story without losing sight of its broader historical significance. Examining the everyday lives of people in the streets, Cohen reveals how a clash between the contradictory currents of Italian Renaissance society fueled much of its conflicts and discontents.

On the one hand, Christian religion preached mercy, forgiveness, and community, on the other the compelling codes of honor, familial loyalty, and unwritten social rules promoted violence and vengeance.

The book also reveals how women and other socially marginalized figures could navigate and manipulate these codes to find space and freedom in a world dominated by powerful men. 

When we think of the Renaissance, we often think of the names of famous artists or writers and the lives of governors of Italian cities.

In this book, Sarah Ross argues for the existence of "everyday renaissances," demonstrating that an interest in and concern of classical antiquity permeated far deeper into the social strata than we previously understood. She demonstrates how classical education and literature mattered to ordinary men and women of the artisanal and mercantile classes, perhaps even more than it did to members of the cultural elite.

She argues that even the most tangential association with culture and learning could help social mobility. I think this is a fascinating examination of how apparently elite cultural concerns can matter to ordinary people and be mobilized by them.