Miles Pattenden

Serena Ferente

Lovro Kunčević

Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe examines the norms and practices of collective decision-making across pre-modern European history, east and west, and their influence in shaping both intra- and inter-communal relationships. Bringing together the work of twenty specialist contributors, this volume offers a unique range of case studies from Ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, and explores voting in a range of different contexts with analysis that encompasses constitutional and ecclesiastical history, social and cultural history, the history of material culture and of political thought. Together the case-studies illustrate the influence of ancient models and ideas of voting on medieval and early modern collectivities and document the cultural and conceptual exchange between different spheres in which voting took place. Above all, they foreground voting as a crucial element of Europe’s common political heritage and raise questions about the contribution of pre-modern cultures of voting to modern political and institutional developments. Offering a wide chronological and geographical scope, Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe is aimed at scholars and students of the history of voting and is a fascinating contribution to the key debates that surround voting today.

Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe

Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 is the first major study of early modern papal elections and uses them as an opening for re-assessing the papacy's wider history in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This was a momentous period for the papacy, which saw them acquire a temporal state, lose half a Church, see their state tip into decline, and then found them coming full circle by burnishing their pastoral credentials once more. Theceremonial pomp and high drama that accompanied early modern papal elections make compelling theatre and are documented here in detail for the first time in English. This study, however, is more than just anarrative account of interesting anecdotes: through the figures of these cardinals, it offers us a unique case study for observing the approaches to decision-making and problem-solving within an elite political group.

Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700

Piers Baker-Bates

The sixteenth century was a critical period both for Spain’s formation and for the imperial dominance of her Crown. Spanish monarchs ruled far and wide, spreading agents and culture across Europe and the wider world. Yet in Italy they encountered another culture whose achievements were even prouder and whose aspirations often even grander than their own. Italians, the nominally subaltern group, did not readily accept Spanish dominance and exercised considerable agency over how imperial Spanish identity developed within their borders. In the end Italians’ views sometimes even shaped how their Spanish colonizers eventually came to see themselves. The essays collected here evaluate the broad range of contexts in which Spaniards were present in early modern Italy. They consider diplomacy, sanctity, art, politics and even popular verse. Each essay excavates how Italians who came into contact with the Spanish crown’s power perceived and interacted with the wider range of identities brought amongst them by its servants and subjects. Together they demonstrate what influenced and what determined Italians’ responses to Spain; they show Spanish Italy in its full transcultural glory and how its inhabitants projected its culture - throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.

Images of Iberia

The Spanish Presence in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Mary Hollingsworth

Arnold Witte

The first comprehensive overview of its subject in any language. Its thirty-five essays explain who cardinals were, what they did in Rome and beyond, for the Church and for wider society.

Miles Pattenden

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