Italian Prince Research Articles

The tyrant and his double: the capture of the tyrannical by the Italian prince in the 16th century

Au cours du xvie siècle, dans l’espace politique italien l’usage de la tyrannie naguère vivement décriée se banalise. Les princes n’hésitent pas à manifester la dimension tyrannique et violente de leur pouvoir et la pensée politique accompagne cette évolution en établissant l’image d’une tyrannie aussi ordinaire que nécessaire qu’il faut accepter patiemment. Cette nouvelle représentation du souverain trouve son aboutissement dans le portrait du prince comme acteur principal des conjurations : en monopolisant ouvertement la violence illégitime en captant à son profit l’image du tyran et du tyrannicide, le prince se donne à voir comme détenteur d’une puissance aussi extrême que masquée et nécessaire. Par là-même, il ferme l’espace d’une possible opposition et pallie son manque de puissance réelle par l’affirmation d’une violence virtuelle.

Zofia Katarzyna Branicka Odescalchi zwana pierwszym „polskim papieżem”

Zofia Branicka (1821-1886) was a Polish wealthy noblewoman who married Italian Prince Livio III Erba Odescalchi (1805-1885) in 1841. From then on until her death she lived in Rome. Thanks to her opulent dowry, Odescalchi family could buy back among others, the Bracciano castle (near Rome) from the Torlonia family. Zofia was very well educated and a polyglot. From the very first years of her stay in Rome, she started to organise famous soirees at her salon in Palazzo Odescalchi. In this way Princess Zofi gathered the elite of aristocracy, diplomacy and the clergy, from diff European countries. Soon she had a possibility to get to know the pope Pius IX, with whom she would maintain a real and close friendship. Zofia had informed the pope about the complex situation of Poland, partitioned by her neighbours. From the beginning of her stay in Italy she was involved in charity work. The princess was very involved in financial and organisational help to Polish people in Italy (emigrees, insurgents, priests, artists as Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Leopold Nowotny, Roman Postempski etc.). She closely co-operated with The Congregation of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ in organising the Polish Seminar in Rome in 1866. That was an event of a great importance for Polish people who at that time had no country of their own. Thanks to her deep religiosity and patriotic activity Princess Zofi was known among her contemporaries as “the Polish pope”. Nobody at that time could have imagine that after one hundred years Karol Wojtyła would become the first actual Polish pope.

Il papa guerriero: Giulio II nello spazio pubblico europeo, by Massimo Rospocher

As Massimo Rospocher explains in the introduction to this book, Julius II is ‘amongst the most important personalities to have shaped our collective imagination of the Renaissance’ (p. 12). For Rospocher, he was ‘the epitome of the Renaissance pope, and of the dual nature of his power—Italian prince and Roman pontiff, European sovereign and universal pastor’; he was the middle figure in a triumvirate of occupants of St Peter’s chair whose exploits are widely seen as defining the period. Yet Julius has neither Alexander VI’s reputation for deviousness or corruption nor Leo X’s for corpulence and extravagance. Instead, he is known for his preoccupation with war: among the many quixotic acts of his ten-year reign, Julius formed two Holy Leagues, subjugated Perugia and Bologna, placed Venice under interdict and excommunicated the duke of Ferrara. In short, he was the man who gave the Church triumphans and militans their most visible expressions yet on the Italian and European stage. Contemporaries wrote about him at length because of that: many found him angry and impetuous, despotic or resolute. Machiavelli famously branded him, above all, lucky. Much of what we know about Julius and his activities comes from Christine Shaw’s excellent biography (now nearly a quarter of a century old) which finessed and corrected presumptions in older papal historiography. But Rospocher, in thinking primarily about how Julius’ peers portrayed him, has cleverly developed an angle which Shaw did not fully consider and which now has the potential to reshape rather radically our understandings of Julius’ personality, of the Renaissance papacy and of the public sphere in early sixteenth-century Europe. This book, despite its title, is not really about Julius at all, but rather about how news and opinions were disseminated during the period of transition between manuscript and print culture. Rospocher uses Julius and the debates surrounding him to explore how, and how effectively, the pope, his supporters and his detractors harnessed the new and evolving medium of print as a tool of mass communication. He shows, among other things, the essentially political nature of much contemporary commentary about Julius—a potentially significant finding in itself for papal historians—and the remarkable exchange of common themes between high culture and the street, for this is a study which is both rich in detail and also makes a significant contribution to historical scholarship.

Leone Caetani’s Annali dell’Islam on Sirah of the Prophet Muhammad

Early Islam and Muslims have long caught the western historians’ fancy. While the well-known works of scholars like von Kremer (d. 1889), Muir (d. 1905), Goldziher (d. 1921), Lammens (d. 1937), and Margoliouth (d. 1940) are seen today as the cornerstones of modern western historiography of Islam, Leone Caetani (d. 1935)’s Annali dell’Islam may well be called its courtyard. Although it is probably the only significant book written by Caetani who was an Italian prince and a brilliant historian on early Islam, even a glance at it instantly impresses an onlooker with its sheer volume and depth. From its meticulous chronologies of major as well as many minor events in the history of Islam to its in-depth analyses of those events and their sources, Annali may be rightly called a major macropedia of Islamic history in a western language. The current paper tries to understand the author’s mind that went into it, taking a small sample from it which covers the Prophet Mu╒ammad (peace be upon him)’s biography or Sirah, which is the starting point not only of Islamic history but also of Islam as we know it today.

The Papacy Since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor. Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x + 275 pp. $99.00 cloth.

The Papacy Since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor. Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x + 275 pp. $99.00 cloth.

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor

:The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor

:<i>The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor</i>

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor – Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor – Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester

The papacy since 1500. From Italian prince to universal pastor. Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester. Pp. x+275 incl. 10 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. £60 (cloth), £17.99 (paper). 978 0 521 50987 9; 978 0 521 72977 2

The papacy since 1500. From Italian prince to universal pastor. Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester. Pp. x+275 incl. 10 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. £60 (cloth), £17.99 (paper). 978 0 521 50987 9; 978 0 521 72977 2

Book Review: The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor

Book Review: The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor – Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor – Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor (review)

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor (review)

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor. Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor. Edited by James Corkery and Thomas Worcester

James Corkery and Thomas Worcester , editors. The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor . New York : Cambridge University Press . 2010 . Pp. x, 275. Cloth $99.00, paper $29.99.

Journal Article James Corkery, Thomas Worcester, editors. The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 275. Cloth $99.00, paper $29.99 Get access James Corkery and Thomas Worcester, editors. The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 275. Cloth $99.00, paper $29.99. The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 1, February 2011, Page 256, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.1.256 Published: 01 February 2011

Le cardinal Henry Edward Manning et la Question Romaine 1875-1877

In a memo on the Roman Question addressed to Mr Disraeli’s government in 1875, cardinal Manning states that if a French intervention were not to be feared, a rapprochement between France Italy and Austria would facilitate the settlement of the religious problem in Italy. Then he describes the political situation of the country, where the people cannot have a say since the revolutionary party has confiscated politics and the Catholics do not vote owing to the violation of the rights of the Holy See. Two years later when a new attack of the Government against the Church aroused Catholic Europe, the cardinal published The Independence of the Holy See to underline that the temporal power of the pope guarantees the peace in Europe and urge the Christians to protect the heritage of the pope that he may exert his role as the counselor, the arbitrator and the guide of the unity of Christian nations. Cardinal Manning understood politics: Pius IX who was detested in his time because he refused to compromise with the revolution is not considered today as a ‘petty Italian prince’ but as the father of modern papacy, the papacy which has paved the way to oecumenism and is starting a dialogue with Islam.

Le Prince, héros civilisateur

What kind of person was the Italian prince at the end of the Middle Ages ? More than someone above his fellow men : he was a hero, whose primary duty was held to be that of denying or of repelling barbarism. He had one essential way of achieving this and his power rested on it : this was war – in the military reality of the times and even more so in its symbolism. This was apparent in rhetoric and iconography, particularly evidenced by the decoration of the palaces. Relying on ancient and medieval models, the Italian prince of the 15th Century positioned himself, when confronted by all these “barbarisms”, as the defender of the civilization that Italy had only recently become aware of incarnating ; this was done within a political perspective, which was in tune with the increase in the phenomenon of “monarchization”.

Professor Nussbaum on The Golden Bowl

I SHOULD LIKE to express my gratitude to Professor Nussbaum in two respects. First, I should like to thank her for having given me an occasion for rereading once more The Golden Bowl. When I originally read the novel many years ago I was impressed, but at the same time somewhat bewildered, by the intricate and labyrinthine treatment it accords to what on the face of it appears to be a fairly straightforward if unusual story of human miscalculation and deception. For what, after all, does the story in essentials amount to? Maggie Verver marries an Italian prince, Amerigo; in doing so she is unaware that he has already had an affair with a friend of hers, Charlotte, and unaware, too, that shortly before the wedding he accompanied Charlotte in search of a wedding present for Maggie-it was then that they considered buying the flawed golden bowl from which the book takes its name. Subsequently she becomes concerned about the loneliness and vulnerability of her father and-still ignorant of the previous relationship with the Prince-helps to arrange his marriage to Charlotte. Not long afterward the Prince and Charlotte resume their affair, eventually arousing suspicions in Maggie which are finally confirmed by evidence of their earlier intimacy that reaches her accidentally through an incident involving the golden bowl. The latter part of the novel concerns Maggie's subtle and ultimately (it appears) successful attempt to deal with the situation in which she finds herself: her relationship with Amerigo is restoredor, rather, fulfilled-and her father and Charlotte leave England for America. This is the bare structure of James's strange but (at least as he presents it) by no means incredible tale. Nevertheless, this simple plot gives no indication of the richness and depth of the book itself: its range and sensitivity, its psychological and moral penetration, its dense texture and sharp attention to detail, and-not least-the curious inexhaustibility both of content and theme which give it the resonance that has often been justly ascribed to it. Professor Nussbaum's paper captures these qualities, and here I should like to acknowledge my second debt to her. For it seems to me that, in concentrating on one crucial aspect of the book, she has provided an exceedingly sharp, imaginative, and perceptive interpretation of the