Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence by Francis W. Kent (review)

Abstract

Professor Bill Kent was a pioneer of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in Australia, and a foundation for some of the most substantial work on the area being done nowadays. His work on Florentine social history spans more than thirty-five years, and stands out by its scrupulous attention to historical detail and by its philological and archival zeal, including the historia minora or minima, and their role in the bigger picture. Much of his gigantic task involved a thorough revision not only of perceived ideas but also of method, and this posthumous volume is a valuable testament to that great legacy. All these qualities are brilliantly illustrated in the fourteen essays reprinted in this collection, and in the concluding chapter on ‘The Death of Lorenzo’, previously unpublished and available here for the first time.This book deals with particular, isolated aspects of a man who strove to reveal very little about himself, cultivating instead an image that blurred the private and the public. In doing so, Lorenzo de’ Medici succeeded in becoming an indispensable leader and social mediator...