IHC Conference in honor of Marvin Becker
Florence: Reconsidered



Friday & Saturday, November 10-11 / FREE
McCune Conference Room / 6020 HSSB

This is a conference on the current state of Renaissance Florentine studies. After the Second World War, Florence became the site of what is surely the most intensive research effort in premodern history. A generation of scholars created a compelling model of the city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the period they considered the early Renaissance. Driven in part by a set of postwar concerns about the origins and future of Western democratic culture, they found in Renaissance Florence a cohesive urban society, mixed neighborhoods in which the palaces of the great merchant families were surrounded by artisans and workers, a republican political system based on consensus, articulated by Leonardo Bruni and others in terms of civic humanism. It was this urban culture that fostered the extraordinary production of arts termed the Florentine Renaissance. Florence despite its many peculiarities became the paradigmatic Renaissance city, the town against which others are measured. Virtually every Western Civilization textbook treats Renaissance Florence, often casting it in Burckhardtian terms as the birth of the modern; it is diffused in guidebooks and even in advertising.

Scholarship on Florence is now at a crucial juncture. The town is if anything even more intensively studied, and in many fields work on Florence sets the standard. New, richer understandings are emerging, views attuned to the complex relations between culture and power within the society. The intensity and high quality of Florentine scholarship has created an unparalleled opportunity to look for new interconnections. We know more about Florence, seen from many angles, than we do about virtually any other premodern city except perhaps revolutionary Paris.

The conference is in honor of the distinguished interdisciplinary Florentinist, Marvin Becker. It will treat subjects ranging from politics and patronage to Boccaccio, from paintings on wedding chests to Renaissance Platonism, from Dante to political fresco. It will bring people together across traditional boundaries, notably method as well as discipline. We will include approaches from cultural studies as well as old-fashioned demography and family reconstitution, historians of philosophy as well as those who reconstruct electoral politics in the archives, specialists who read family account books with art historians who analyze formal properties of works of art.

click here for a conference registration form

For further information contact: Justin Marbardi jmabardi@humanitas.ucsb.edu, Event Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara (805) 893-3907 fax 893-4336

This event is co-sponsored by University of California Humanities Research Institute and UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

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