Lauro Martines

Almost all accounts of the Pazzi conspiracy --which almost killed Lorenzo de' Medici and did kill his brother Giuliano -- are pro-Medici, partly because Lorenzo ended up the winner and winners notoriously write history (or hire it done) and partly because Lorenzo went on to be a great cultural patron and, arguably, the pivot of peace in the Italian peninsula for a generation. However this book on the whole leans the other way. I had previously understood that Medici control of Florence was generally accepted from the time of Lorenzo's grandfather Cosimo "the Elder," but this book makes clear that there was a genuine republican opposition which regularly challenged Medici rule and only narrowly lose on reasonably free votes in the major councils ; the Pazzi clan were by no mean the only ones who suffered from Medici financial and political harassment. However, their alliance with Pope Sixtus IV gave them the backing that almost made their coup possible, and even after it failed, Sixtus and his allies fought the Medici to a bloody stalemate for years. Also, though I had known the archbishop of Pisa Salviati was in the plot and got hanged for it, I had not realized that his appointment as an anti-Medici candidate to a diocese critical to Florentine control of Pisa was a major source of the conflict with Sixtus and the Pazzi. Moreover, Sixtus had transferred the papal alum monopoly which was a key source of Medici wealth to the Pazzi. All this background makes a lot more sense to me now.… (mais)

Oh Most Serene Reublic, you have been betrayed. I have never read Julia Kristeva's efforts at fiction. That said I like the idea of academics pursuing some novelistic muse. I feel Terry Eagleyton's foray onto the field is quite fun https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/188827.Saints_and_Scholars. That said Dr. Martines has ill-served 16th Century Venice with his poorly defined mess. The tale assumes a postmodern guise as a series of collected documents: diairies, dispatches and confessions unfold and overlap. This should be interesting, no? Well it should have been. Instead lengthy tangents on lust and hermetism in cisterns spoil the pudding and that's no punning. I'm sure Dr. Martines wished to illustrate the contradictions of the time between its rhetoric and its divided, unequal reality. It is likely that it is this ambition which kept it from a single star.… (mais)