Forged In The Shadow Of Mars Chivalry And Violence In Late Medieval Florence Peter W Sposato by Peter W. Sposato 9781501761911, 1501761919 instant download after payment.

In Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Peter W. Sposato traces chivalric ideology's powerful influence on the worldview and behavior of the elites of late medieval Florence. Sposato's work challenges traditional views of chivalry as foreign to the city-state's social and cultural landscape and contests its reputation as a civilizing force. In contrast to the mercantile and banking elites with whom they competed for political power and economic resources, Florentine chivalric elites chose to base their identities on the profession of arms rather than on more lucrative and pacific occupations. They also utilized violence against their peers to assert and defend their honor against those they perceived as socially inferior, reinforcing their claims of social superiority. Closely examining the ideological underpinnings of political violence in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence and their connection to the chivalric values promoted in literary texts, Forged in the Shadow of Mars shows how chivalric elites played an important role in transforming the city-state into the dominant territory of north-central Italy. Sposato also provides an important corrective to assumptions about the nature of elite violence in medieval Italian cities, complicating the familiar understanding of Italian communal elites as a homogeneous group animated by mercantile and civic values.