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Ingeborg van Vugt and Gloria Moorman. “Medici Rule Reimagined: Cosimo III, the Dutch Republic, and Grand Ducal Aspirations for Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (c. 1667-1723),” Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 7: 4 (2022): 385-433. The article features exciting case-studies on transnational pineapples, a foreign professor of Greek in Pisa, and the marvels of Amsterdam as "magazzino del mondo.” Summary: During his famous sojourns in the Dutch Republic (1667–1669), young Prince Cosimo iii de’ Medici (1642–1723) encountered an enticingly modern strain of republicanism. This article argues for the first time that the splendour of the Dutch Golden Age proved the ideal décor to reimagine Tuscany’s own, administrative past and present. The prose and poetry produced by Medici courtiers abroad indicates that Cosimo iii’s ambitious agenda abroad was influenced predominantly by his desire to implement environmental reform and portray a contrasting socio-political model at home. Cosimo’s princely journeys were followed by ongoing transnational exchange, as testified by the court’s efforts to conceptualize a Medici town atlas and cultivate exotic pineapple plants on the Tuscan soil. By importing artefacts and ideas, then, Cosimo iii – just prior to his succession by Gian Gastone (1671–1737), last of the Medici grand dukes – sought to consciously craft the Medici dynasty’s lasting legacy.

Congratulations to Dr Elizabeth Goldring (CSR Honorary Reader) who has been short-listed for the 2020 William M. B. Berger Prize for British Art History, for her book Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist . This prize is awarded annually to 'the best book published in the field'.