Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy

The first study to analyse popular protest across the Italian peninsula and the Venetian colonies during the early modern period, 1494 to 1559. Drawing on a vast range of contemporary documents, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. places these incidents of popular protest and their patterns in comparative perspectives.

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and teaches at the University of Glasgow. He received his PhD from Harvard, supervised by David Herlihy, in 1978. He has published thirteen monographs, three edited volumes, and over 100 articles in journals such as Past & Present, Economic History Review, Social History, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Les Annales, and Studi Storici. Over the past two decades, he has taught and published on two broad themes: the history of plagues and the history of popular insurrection. In 2017 he was the first 'Federico Chabod Visiting Professor', L'Università degli Studi, Milano (Statale).

- Introduction: Questions and Sources - Prologue: The Decline in Popular Revolt in Fifteenth-Century Italy - Part I: Differences - 1: Chants and Flags - 2: Prices and Crises - 3: Women - 4: Shopkeepers and Soldiers - Part II: Convergences - 5: Varieties of Protest (i): Peasants, Alliances, Economics, and Religion - 6: Varieties of Revolt (ii): Leaders, Hate, Nobles, Children, the popolo - 7: Ideals of Representation - 8: Equality