100 books like Aretino's Dialogues

I’m including one book from long ago and far away – fourteenth-century Italy – because it leaped out at me from the bookshelf.

The Decameron is the most artistically complete written story about face-to-face storytelling – though I also love its rivals, One Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales!

The book opens with the bubonic plague that devastated Florence in 1348. Ten wealthy young friends, women and men, leave the stricken city to vacation in the countryside. While servants prepare lavish meals, the friends spend their days relaxing, dancing – and telling naughty stories. The narrator delights in describing their reactions to each other’s storytelling.

Yes, stories can be holy and powerful, but sometimes we just need them to clown around for us! Many translations are available – read one that feels playful. 

I appreciate people who don’t shrink from celebrating their own genius, and Benvenuto Cellini was indeed a genius at it. Still, I didn’t mind his boasting, whether it was about his intricate works as a goldsmith or his killing of a rival, for his sense of humor about himself more than made up for his monstrous ego. And even if he had left us nothing else but his autobiography, he bequeathed to us a brilliant record of the Renaissance.

Researching the trials and tribulations of a Renaissance food taster meant that I had to become familiar with the court cuisine of the period, the ingredients used in their preparation, and most vitally, the politics of the kitchen. I was delighted to find that many of Platina’s recipes can still be enjoyed today; I have made cabbage stuffed with walnuts, chicken fried with diced lemon, and my personal favorite, cherry cheesecake.

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. 

This book is a fantastic, broad overview of the Italian Renaissance (or rinascimento, the term Ruggiero prefers and which his subjects would have recognized). The Italian Rinascimento was a period, according to Ruggiero, of vibrant cities, social change, and cultural expression, in which intellectuals, politicians, and artists both looked back to an idealized classical past and forward to uncharted territory.

I love the way this book focuses on issues that preoccupied the people he studies and incorporates topics often absent from works on the Renaissance, including women, sexuality, economics, disease and death, and religion, among others. Even more important, perhaps, is that it is clear, accessible, and engaging, and demonstrates a wealth of knowledge developed over an illustrious career as a historian of early modern Italy.

It’s not often I’m moved to tears by an academic book, but this book did it for me by putting me in the shoes of a Florentine patrician trying to comfort his friend the night before his execution. The main historical source of the book is an extraordinary ‘how-to’ manual: the one used by the ‘comforting confraternities’ of 16th-century Bologna, men who volunteered to spiritually prepare condemned criminals for their final moments on earth and, in so doing, hopefully increase their chances of salvation. The book explains the various methods and tools that the comforter could use, including prayers, songs, and pictures, and reveals the complex rituals of execution that began long before the prisoner’s arrival at the scaffold. A moving account of the realities of historical capital punishment.

I was captivated by this epic tale of Grazia dei Rossi, secretary to the powerful wife of the Pope’s physician and the daughter of a powerful banker.

The book gave me a fascinating peek into Jewish life in Renaissance Italy as Grazia struggles between the temptations of Christian life and the pull of her Jewish heritage.

Most art in the Renaissance was commissioned by specific patrons and this book superbly illustrates the complex interaction among patron, artist, and society by focusing on the greatest patron of art and architecture in fifteenth-century Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici was the most powerful figure in the city’s political and economic life, a fabulously wealthy banker, a devout Christian, but he had also an impeccable nose for great art. With the help of about 200 images, the book examines the religious, personal, and dynastic motivations behind Cosimo’s artistic patronage, both his direct commissions for the Medici palaces, villas, and chapels as well as his active involvement in the works officially commissioned by the republic. What you’ll get out of this book is a profound understanding of how art was commissioned, created, and viewed in Renaissance Florence.

I was delighted when Maggie O’Farrell started writing historical fiction, and this one is a masterclass in novel writing.

It opens as teenaged Lucrezia is taken to a remote hunting lodge by her husband Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara. He has ordered all her personal servants to remain behind and as they eat dinner, she realizes he is planning to kill her. What a beginning! The writing is lush and colorful, the characterizations subtle, and the story utterly gripping.