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Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Amanda G. Madden, "Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Description: Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (Cornell UP, 2025) is a study of the practice of vendetta among the civic elites in sixteenth-century Italy and illustrates the complex and integral role that vendetta violence played in civic life and state formation on the winding path to state centralization. At many temporal, geographic, and political points in early modern Italy, vendetta appears to have not only disrupted but also constituted the processes by which the modern state emerged.
Dr. Amanda G. Madden examines vendetta as both central to politics and as an engine o...