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Gli ultimi guelfi : Linguaggi e identità politiche in Italia nella seconda metà del Quattrocento

This book is the product of five years of research on thousands of documents scattered in six different Italian and French archives. In treating partisanship as an Italian phenomenon, rather than confining it to a single city or regional state, it offers a completely new approach to the political history of Renaissance Italy. Finally, it provides an analysis of the formation of a shared vernacular vocabulary of politics in fifteenth-century Italy, based on a heterogeneous selection of ordinary linguistic documents, such as correspondence, personal memoirs or minutes of councils.

This book explores partisanship in fifteenth-century Italy. It focuses on a small group of Guelfs, men (and some women) who knew the 'practice' of politics and on four different but connected contexts (Milan, Florence, Genoa and the Kingdom of Naples). The lexicon of politics of fifteenth-century sources has a prominent place in the analysis. The resulting picture is a radical revision of traditional views of medieval factionalism: long-lived political identities retained ideological and practical validity within and across state borders, while institutionalised parties, far from being simply agents of disorder, were constitutive of the legitimate political order.