Power and Politics in Early Modern Italy

All English-speaking historians of Italy during the early modern period, roughly from the beginning of the sixteenth to the close of the eighteenth century, stand deeply indebted to the work of Eric Cochrane. In 1973, Cochrane published Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800 (University of Chicago Press), which, rather than providing a narrative account of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under its Medici and Lorraine princes, grouped together a sequence of separate essays. Each essay focused on an individual selected by Cochrane as an emblem of his epoch. Some were as well known as Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, for the 1540s or Galileo, for the 1630s, while others had attracted only a limited amount of research, at least in English, until Cochrane dragged them into the scholarly light. Some were attached to the political life of Florence, others to the worlds of natural science or to what we would now consider cultural history.