Early Modern Italian history has traditionally been presented in the context of the absence of a unified Italian state, foreign domination and of relative decline to former wealth and power. This new volume calls on a wealth of recent research to portray the complex history of the early modern Italian states on their own terms. A leading team of historians traces Italian material and cultural bonds of identity and solidarity beyond their common political narrative - from the Reformation through the hopes and frustrations of reform, renewal and restructuring of social and economic power to the eventual collapse of the Old Regime.

• Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders on the Grand Tour


• I The Institutional Framework: Late Renaissance Resolutions


• 2: John Jeffries Martin: Religion, Renewal, and Reform of the Old Church


• II Material Life: Economic, Social, and Political, and Economic Trajectories


• 4: Gianna Pomata: Family and Gender


• 5: R. Burr Litchfield: The Social World: Cohesion, Conflict, and the City


• 6: Geoffrey Symcox: The Political World of the Absolutist State in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries


• III Ideologies and Practices: Competing Languages, Converging Visions


• 8: Jon R Snyder: Mare Magnum: the Arts in the Early Modern Age


• 9: Paula Findlen: Science and Society


• 10: David Gentilcore: The Ethnography of Everyday Life


• IV The Challenge and Crisis of the Old Regime


• 12: Anna Maria Rao: Enlightenment and Reform


• Conclusion


• Further Reading


• Chronology


• Maps

John Marino is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Nales and Good Government in Spanish Naples. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, a Fondazione Fellowship, an Exxon Fellowship, and a Newberry Library-NEH Fellowship, and is past president of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.