Florentine Society in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries*

Abstract

The study of late-cinquecento Florence might well commence by repeating the plaint voiced by Professor J. H. Elliott with reference to seventeenth-century Spain: ‘… in most of its aspects, our picture of the reigns of Philip III and IV remains very much as it was drawn by Martin Hume in the old Cambridge Modern History over fifty years ago’. Indeed, we might go further by saying that our subject remains pretty much today where Riguccio Galluzzi left it in 1781: aterra incognitaeven the contours of which are hazy. This essay seeks to adumbrate the shape and texture of this society, to isolate some of its prominent and especially revealing features, to suggest that it retained some of the vitality and tension it had known in the past and, hopefully, to encourage others to turn their attention to this neglected area of Florentine studies.