This paper deals with the expression boni homines or boni viri in Burgundian sources from the ninth to the end of the thirteenth century. It focuses on the practical meaning of the expression. After discussing some general aspects of the sources, the paper analyzes the use of the expression in relation to the social roles performed by the individuals whom it described, and then examines the formulary use of said expression in the context of the transformation of legal and governmental practices in the duchy of Burgundy.
This article reconsiders the role of magnificence in late medieval political thinking, focusing on how the built environment was thought to evoke authority through its capacity to inspire admiration. The study traces the intellectual roots for these ideas back to scholastic commentaries of Aristotle’s Politics . Commentators such as Albert the Great and Giles of Rome expanded upon Aristotle’s insights, arguing that awe induced by magnificence could suspend the viewer in admiration, leading to reverence and support for political rule. In his De regimine principum , Giles applied these ideas on the protective role of magnificence specifically to princely residences. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century mirrors for princes testify how widespread the notion became that a magnificent residence leads to authority. Through a close reading of Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis , and by examining manuscript circulation of Giles’s De regimine principum in Florence, this article further investigates how this discourse on magnificent architecture—initially formulated in and for courtly contexts—was absorbed into civic humanist settings such as fifteenth-century Florence, where magnificence was claimed to project collective power as the magnificence of the cityscape was thought to evoke admiration that sustains domination.
This article explores the intersection of Renaissance politics, rhetoric, and cartographic knowledge in the works of Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Niccolò Machiavelli. It first examines how Bruni and Poggio harness cartographic references in their panegyrics to reinforce a centralized, oligarchic vision of governance, and establish morally and politically justifiable hierarchies in society. The article then analyzes the various ways in which Machiavelli challenges the class-based ideologies upheld by earlier humanists. While scholars have traditionally examined these texts in isolation or have connected their spatial representations primarily to painting, this study approaches them through a shared interpretive framework, using the concept of “cartographic rhetoric,” a mode of discourse that draws on geography, cartographic thinking, and emerging visual strategies to either solidify a centralized ideology and the spatial vision it embodies, or to destabilize its legitimacy.
This paper examines the functions of the office of pristav in the medieval County of Zagreb, which was a part of the duchy of Slavonia and a wider Croatian historical area, in the transitional period of the thirteenth century. This was when literary culture started being introduced on a significant scale into a still largely oral society. The sources studied here indicate that pristav s were primarily employed as court officials in matters concerning landed property. These were very important matters, as property was in this period becoming a crucial social factor that determined one’s social standing. The pristav ’s task was to inspect boundaries, perform liveries of seisin, memorize court procedures, and guarantee the permanence of a party’s property rights. Parallels can be drawn between the situation in the County of Zagreb and the medieval Kingdom of Croatia farther to the south, and it is evident that in the latter the pristav s retained most of their early medieval capacities very late into the Middle Ages. In the area studied in this paper, their role was diminishing as legal matters were increasingly taken over by local assemblies of nobles, and as matters regarding landed estates became dependent on written records.
Andrea Mantegna’s depiction of the simian man has been perceived merely as one of the hybrid creatures that represent vices in his painting of the Roman goddess Minerva (Pallas Athena) expelling the vices from her garden. This hybrid image has no precedent in Romanesque sculpture, moralizing bestiaries, animal tales, or Gothic margins. The raised hand of the monkey with the palm exposed reveals what is known as a simian flexion crease or a single transverse palmar flexion crease characteristic of simians, but rarely found in humans. The depiction indicates that Mantegna painstakingly sketched the palm of an actual monkey in his effort to depict its authentic features, suggesting that his simian man was related to contemporary developments in the fields of physiognomy and comparative anatomy in Northern Italy and is a significant expression of “pre-Vesalian” empirical anatomy.
