John Gagne - Böcker

While preparing for an event at the University of Sydney in 2017, a librarian turned to the back page of the library's 1497 copy of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and made a curious discovery. In red chalk was a drawing of a woman and baby, and an inscription in Italian:On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent artist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace.This discovery would shine the international art history spotlight on Sydney and begin a project that has seen state-of-the-art imaging techniques used alongside good old-fashioned archival research in a quest for answers.Was the drawing on the endpaper actually by Giorgione? Was Dante his inspiration? Do we have for the first time the dates of Giorgione's birth and death? How should we reimagine Giorgione's chronology? And how did the early edition of Divine Comedy end up in Sydney?Bringing together scholars from art history, Italian studies, librarianship and book history from Sydney to the Vatican, Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable tells a story of the provenance and significance of this remarkable discovery.

A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars.In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion. John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost.Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.

Who were the shadow agents of Renaissance war? In this pioneering collection of essays scholars use new archival evidence and other sources, including literature, artworks, and other non-textual material, to uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by means of their preparatory, auxiliary, infrastructural, or supplementary labour. These shadow agents worked in the zone between visibility and invisibility, often moving between civilians and soldiers, and their labour was frequently forced. This volume engages with a range of important debates including: the relationship between war and state formation; the ‘military revolution’ or transformation of early modern military force; the nature of human and non-human agency; gender and war; civilian protection and expulsion; and espionage and diplomacy. The focus of the volume is on Italy, but it includes studies of France and England, and the editors place these themes in a broader European context with the aim of supporting and stimulating research in this field.