Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence by Gene Brucker

Product Details

Synopsis

This compelling account of a wronged woman in Renaissance Florence, first published in 1986, is a fascinating view of Florentine society and its attitudes on love, marriage, class, and gender. Lusanna was a beautiful woman from a middle-class background who, in 1455, brought suit against Giovanni, her aristocratic lover, when she learned he had contracted to marry a woman of his own class. Blending scholarship with insightful narrative, the book portrays an extraordinary woman who challenged the unwritten codes and barriers of the social hierarchy and dared to seek a measure of personal independence in a male-dominated world.

Library Journal

In 1455, Lusanna, the beautiful widow of an artisan, brought an ultimately un successful suit against Giovanni, an aristocrat, seeking legal recognition of their clandestine marriage. The author skillfully reconstructs the story of these former lovers. Their dispute, and affair, is amply documented in the sometimes seamy witness testimony contained in Florentine court records. While this case is a highly atypical example of one woman's determined challenge to the social norm, the resultant court battle sheds additional light on Renaissance Florence's class system as well as con temporary legal, moral, and sexual con ventions. This work is a fine example of microhistory, which emphasizes the story of specific events or ordinary peo ple hitherto ignored. Recommended particularly for academic history and women's studies collections. William F. Young, SUNY at Albany Lib.

Biography

Gene Brucker is Shepard Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.He is the author of Renaissance Florence (California, 1983), Florence: The Golden Age (California, 1998), and Living on the Edge in Leonardo's Florence: Selected Essays (California, 2005).