Living on the Edge in Leonardo's Florence

Brucker is one of the old masters of Florentine social and political history, and this collection conveniently brings together ten of his essays from the last decade. Most have been previously published, but some are difficult to access, and three are published here for the first time. Following a short autobiographical and historiographical introduction, the essays fall into two broad groups. The first five essays are sweeping overviews of Italian history, though always with a particular focus on Florence. Chapter One reassesses Jacob Burckhardt's enduring interpretation of the Italian Renaissance and its subsequent ‘decline’. In chapter two, Brucker takes up Robert Putnam's thesis on civic participation in pre-modern Italy—in the case of Florence, he argues that the consolidation of Medici rule in the sixteenth century eradicated all traces of the civil society that had flourished in the earlier period. Chapter Three examines the development of Italian national identity over the

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