Thomas V. Cohen

Cultural history of early modern European streets

Cultural History of Early Modern Streets-An Introduction, Riitta Laitinen with Thomas Cohen 1. Urban Landscapes: Houses, Streets and Squares of 18th Century Lisbon, Maria Helena Barreiros 2. Mechanisms of the Hue and Cry in Kolozsvar in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, Emese Balint 3. Urban Order and Street Regulation in Seventeenth-Century Sweden, Riitta Laitinen & Dag Lindstrom 4. To Pray, To Work, To Hear, To Speak: Women in Roman Streets c. 1600, Elizabeth S. Cohen 5. Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice, Alexander Cowan 6. To See and To Be Seen: Beauty in the Early Modern London Street, Anu Korhonen Index

Endangered history: character and narrative in early American historical writing

Italy in the Renaissance Society: Who Was Who Dangers Family and Other Solidarities Hierarchies Moralities: Honor and Religion Keeping Order Media, Literacy, and Schooling Spaces Time Life Cycles: From Birth Through Adolescence Life Cycles: From Marriage Through Death Houses, Food, and Clothing Disease and Healing Work Play Last Words Notes Resources and Bibliography

Reflections on Retelling a Renaissance Murder

This mischievously artful essay plays out on several levels; think of them as storeys of an imaginary castle much like the real, solid, central Italian one it explores and expounds. On its own ground floor, the essay recounts a gruesome murder, a noble husband’s midnight revenge upon his wife and upon her bastard lover, his own half–brother, in her castle chamber, in bed. In sex. Of course. The murder itself is pure Renaissance, quintessential Boccaccio or Bandello, but the aftermath, in fort and village, is more singular, more ethnographically delightful, as castle and village trace a ceremonious passage from frozen limbo to fluid grief and storytelling, finally set in motion by the arrival of the dead wife’s brother. Meanwhile, one flight up, the essay retells my own investigation of the real castle’s geometry, as I clambered through rooms, peered out windows, prowled the roof, and scanned blueprints seeking the places of the plotters’ plots. In an expository attic, I lodge reflections on my teaching stratagems, as I led a first–year seminar into detection’s crafts and exposition’s ploys. All the while, on its rooftop, this essay dances among fantastical chimneys and turrets of high theory and literary practice, musing on the patent irony of artful artifice, which evokes both the irony and the pathos of scholars’ cool histories about hot deeds and feelings. Art suggests we authors had best hide ourselves, unlike normal essayists, so as not to spoil the show. But, I posit, our self–effacement is so conspicuous that it proclaims our presence, as in fact it should, and, by so doing, trumpets the necessary tensions of our artifice and craft. Thus artfulness itself nicely both proclaims and celebrates the bittersweet frustrations of historians’ and readers’ quest for knowledge and, especially, for experience of a lost past.

Cultural History Of Early Modern Streets— An Introduction

The articles in this collection deal with the early modern street—a public space that was never completely separate from other public spaces, or indeed from private spaces. This introduction presents central themes for the following six articles that explore the history of the street in various European towns. Public and private, order and disorder, and control and hierarchy are discussed, and the inextricable link between the material and the immaterial in the history of the street is emphasized.

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (review)

recent studies on gender and race, ethnicity and sexuality exemplify. Nonetheless the wide-ranging subject-matter is an important contribution of this book; readability is another. Drawing on prior research, the ten contributors of parts 2 through 4 highlight the complexity of Renaissance society and demonstrate just how broad the margins could be and how many different ways of belonging existed in Renaissance cities. For these reasons, At the Margins is particularly well suited for both graduate and undergraduate classes. GIOVANNA BENADUSI University of South Florida

Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates

The social historian, searching for the basis of a culture, often turns to a study of ordinary people. Perhaps one of the most revealing places to find them is in a court of law. In this presentatoin of nine criminal trials of sixteenth-century Rome (1540-75), where magistrates kept verbatim records, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen paint a lively portrait of a society, one that is reminiscent of Boccaccio. These stories, however, are true. Each trial transcript is followed by an essay that interprets the beliefs, codes, everyday speech, and personal transactions of a world that is radically different from our own. The people on trial include assassins, a spell-caster, an exorcist, an adulterous wife, several courtesans, and the peasant cast of a bawdy, sacrilegious play. Out of their often pognant troubles, and their machinations, comes a vivid revelation of not only the tumultuous street life of Rome but also rituals of honour, the power and weakness of women, and the realities of social and economic hierarchies. Like cinema-verite, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome gives us an intimate glimpse of a people and their world.