Italy in the age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216-1380 Book

Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch is the second volume chronologically in the Longman History of Italy, under the General Editorship of Professor Denys Hay. The years it covers saw the rise of the great communes, Florence and Venice, and the emergence, after fierce internecine struggles, of the new single-person governments or Signorie. At the same time the Italian towns were consolidating a commercial empire that stretched from England to China, while the Italian countryside began to take on its present-day aspect. It was a period of contrasts of riches and poverty which produced many explosions of urban and rural discontent. It also saw the development of the Franciscans, the first inquisitorial repression of heretics, and the rise of that scholastic philosophy in which Italians like St Thomas Aquinas played so large a part. At the same time the names of Giotto, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio bear witness to the extraordinary cultural growth of the time and the flowering of early humanism. The period culminated in the first terrifying attacks of the Black Death on the peninsula. John Larner examines all these major developments in his book, but also seeks to say something about the lives of those so often neglected by historians in the past: woman, children, the poor and the outcast. His account of one of the most formative periods of Italian history is a work of great distinction and will be of absorbing interest to anyone concerned with the history of Italy, whether as scholar, student, tourist or armchair traveller.