Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Alexander Lee, "Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Description: Renaissance humanists and the Holy Roman Empire haven’t mixed well in most scholarship. Humanists were supposed to be learned exponents of liberty. Often employed by Italian city-states, their civic pride and positive valuation of the ancient Roman Republic meant, it was claimed, that empire was anathema to them.But in a lucidly written and penetrating study of the early Renaissance, Dr. Alexander Lee turns these narratives on their heads. Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 2018) looks at the relationship between humanists of northern Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. It fi...