Please note that this module was available
until 2012, but has since been
withdrawn and is no longer available.

---

Tutor: Dr Humfrey Butters 

This undergraduate final-year one-term Special Subject is designed for students who have spent the winter term in Venice, studying the Advanced Option 'Florence and Venice in the Renaissance (HI320)'. Like all Special Subjects it is designed to give students the opportunity to study a period and set of problems in depth, with the aid of primary printed sources. Students who take the module will already have acquired in Venice a good general grasp of the main features of Italian history in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

In Italy the thirteenth century witnessed the triumph of the Papacy over the German Emperors, the continued advance of papal government, the appearance of the friars, the climax of a period of unprecedented economic growth, the eruption of factional conflict in virtually every city in the northern and central regions of the peninsula, and the evolution of an increasingly sophisticated approach to the literary and artistic heritage of classical antiquity. Florence was involved in all these developments; and of all of them Dante was a keen observer. It is the purpose of this module to study them through his writings and through those of his Florentine contemporaries such as Giovanni Villani and Dino Compagni.