Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance - Softcover

Providing a rich fund of examples, Martines' brilliant study reaches a more complex reality than the historical record reveals.

Martines's contribution should become required reading in the social history of Renaissance Italy.

Martines makes brilliant use of the 'archive' of literature—poetry, novellas, tales, letters, and dramas—to recreate aspects of the social and cultural world of the Renaissance... Strong Words is a rarity—a strongly-felt creation, filled with humanity.

Strong Words succeeds as a vigorous portrait of Renaissance society viewed through its literature, a compelling introduction not only to a body of literature but to the world that produced it.

Strong Words is one of the author's most challenging and difficult enterprises, and one of his most impressive. He has moved into largely uncharted terrain.

Beautifully written, every sentence of it, and a sweeping, comprehensive fresco of nearly 300 years of Italian writing.

Magnificently written, almost as if Martines had invented a new language to describe and analyze the world of the Italian Renaissance cities.

Strong Words is a social history of the Italian Renaissance (1300–1560) in a cultural key. Using tales, poems, prayers, and letters as primary sources, Lauro Martines probes religious sensibilities, love, alienation, explosive feeling against political authority, the moral strains of patronage, and the close ways of urban neighborhoods. Case studies of suicide and the seduction of propertied women sharpen the analysis.

By moving behind literary posture and metaphor, Martines exposes the power of local angers, fears, and loyalties, of misogyny, cruelty, and women's space. The vitality of urban experience in Renaissance Italy passes before us, as we see the language of literature giving form and immediacy to the emotions of everyday life.