The Medicean Succession

The Medicean Succession: Monarchy and Sacral Politics in Duke Cosimo dei Medici's Florence, by Gregory Murry. Cambridge & London, Harvard University Press, 2014. xiii, 347 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). Gregory Murry's The Medicean Succession is an important book that tackles a significant omission in scholarship on Cosimo 1 de' Medici and transition from republic to principality in sixteenth-century Florence: role of and political theology in creation of Medici principato. As Giorgio Vasari's The Apotheosis of Cosimo 1 (painted in mid-1560s and gracing cover of book) illustrates perfectly, by last decade of Medici duke's reign he had achieved a secure sacral identity as a divine prince. Murry demonstrates how this political apotheosis occurred persuasively and with a wealth of evidence. His central argument is that Cosimo succeeded because he engaged sensitively and perceptively with local religious understandings and values. He adapted and adopted Florentines' preexisting assumptions about nature of sacred (p. 10) and channeled them into creation of a powerful image of sacral monarchy. In practice this meant that these same preexisting assumptions also demarcated boundaries of Cosimo's terrestrial divinity. So that while Medici duke had to import entire idea of sacral monarchy to former republic from ultramontane principalities, he could not copy everything used by kings of France, Spain, and England. The Florentine duke, for instance, never advanced a claim to thaumaturgical powers or mythical ancestry. As Murry points out, these absences, and others, highlight in relief constraints upon Cosimo's articulation of divine monarchy. The book consists of six substantive chapters each of which considers one issue or concept. Murry first examines how the familiarity of terrestrial divinity smoothed path for Cosimo's apotheosis. Similarly, beliefs about action of providence in everyday life, in combination with Latin Church's doctrine of free will, made claims to divine-right monarchy uncontroversial, even in a former republic. Murry also analyzes Cosimo's activity as an ecclesiastical patron, cultivating a network of powerful clients for benefit of his statecraft. Two chapters proffer arguments about how Cosimo and his mythmakers engaged with long shadows cast by Machiavelli and Savonarola, presenting prince as an anti-Machiavellian defender of Christian virtues and a Savonarolan moral reformer. The final chapter addresses how Cosimo defended and attempted to control traditional, local religious practice, examining use of space and ritual as well as duke's promotion of indulgences and certain miraculous images. Murry bases his argument on a cultural historical analysis of a wide-range of source material, both printed and manuscript. He uses sermons, encomia, and treatises written by Cosimo's myth makers as well as legislation to analyze presentation and proliferation of ideas of about sacral monarchy. He also mines riches of Mediceo del Principato archive both to demonstrate how these ideas circulated in Medici court in a more restricted or private context as well as to grapple with thorny question of Cosimo's own religious sensibilities

Apotheosis · Art · Divinity · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Reign · Theology · Classics · Law · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies