Power and the Sacred in Renaissance Florence, 1375-1460

FAIN: FB-53390-07

David S. Peterson
Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA 24450-2116)

An NEH Fellowship will enable me to complete my two-volume book manuscript on religion and the church in Florentine politics, 1375-1460. Volume I demonstrates how the Florentine government extended controls over the church and lay religious life over the course of the papal schism (1378-1417). Volume II shows how the church reasserted its control of the sacred and its role as a legitimizing agency in fifteenth-century Florentine social and political life. The study adds a religious component to the predominantly secular historiography of Renaissance Florence, and thus a new view of the context of Florence’s artistic Renaissance and of the understudied Italian church in the century before the Reformation.