Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante

The church in the age of Dante was pretty fully covered by Robert Davidsohn a century ago in his Geschichte von Florenz (1908) and the four volumes of his Forschungen Zur älteren Geschichte von Florenz (1896–1908, rev. ante, xviii [1903], 156–9 and xxvi [1911], 371–8), with an unrivalled knowledge of the archives of Tuscany. In contrast with Davidsohn, Professor Dameron is aiming at a picture rather than a narrative and his book is largely confined to Florence and its diocese. His book has also been able to use later publications, particularly those by De la Roncière on the countryside. He also makes even fuller use than Davidsohn of the documents among the notarial archives in the Archivio di Stato and of the archiepiscopal and capitular archives. The book in fact extends beyond the ‘age of Dante’ to tell us about events in the mid-fourteenth century, which indicate how similar ecclesiastical

Art · Humanities · Literature · Narrative · Classics · History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies