Description

This volume honours F.W. (Bill) Kent (1942-2010), internationally renowned scholar of Renaissance Florence and founding editor of the Europa Sacra series. Kent belonged to an energetic generation of Australians who, in the late 1960s, tackled the Florentine archives and engaged key issues confronting historians of that ever-fascinating city. With his meticulous archival findings and contextual interpretations spanning a scholarly career of more than forty years, Kent engaged with, indeed drove, the scholarly response to many of the issues that have shaped not just our current and emerging understanding of Florence and other urban centres of Italy, but along with that, a more nuanced view of the role of frontier towns and the countryside. Interdisciplinary in scope and grounded in visual, literary, and archival materials, the essays presented here explore a variety of facets of the society of Renaissance Italy, confronting and extending themes that have been emerging in recent decades and exemplified by Kent's work. These themes include the role of kinship and networks, power and agency in Laurentian Florence, gender, ritual, representation, patronage, spirituality, and the generation and consumption of material culture.