Dale Kent

Eating Right in the Renaissance (review)

Non-Florentinist readers, however, may and the book narrow, even parochial. With a few exceptions, the essays rarely stray from the people, institutions, and politics of the urban core of Florence. This feature is not wholly negative. With such a strong focus, the volume achieves a coherence that is rare in festschriften. Nevertheless, the volume might have beneated from comparative analysis. The secondary literature now provides context that was not available when Brucker set forth. But even though other regions in Italy (and beyond) presently offer a considerable perspective on most of the topics treated in this volume, its essays make only sporadic efforts to understand Florentine experience in the light of any other.

Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (review)

of ethnicity and legal deanitions of free versus non-free as “one of the very arst occasions in the pre-modern era when legal enslavement was ethnically and not religiously determined” (124). McKee’s book is an important contribution to the study of medieval colonial societies. Though based on a careful and precise reconstruction of society and politics on Crete, the book goes beyond local history to offer insights into the dynamic interactions of colonial political systems with ethnic identities and into the way these regimes manipulated ethnic categories for their own purposes, offering a widely applicable lesson in a post-Kosovon world.