| In 1537, the brutal murder of the heirless Duke Alessandro dei Medici brought the young and relatively inexperienced Cosimo dei Medici to the ducal chair of the most tumultuous city of the age: Renaissance Florence. This study examines how Cosimo used the politics of the sacred to legitimate monarchical rule in a city in which sacral monarchy had no historical precedent and few indigenous traditions. Utilizing a broad sweep of sources including government documents, letters, testaments, sermons, devotional literature, humanist tracts, diaries, art, and monastery records, the dissertation argues that Cosimo and his literati borrowed only the models of sacral monarchy that could be inscribed in local cultural and religious assumptions, the mundane axioms and organizing principles of thought with which Florentines and Tuscans made sense of their daily reality. In a sentence, Cosimo's grandiose political claims worked because they were only a special case of more generalized assumptions writ deeply into both the intellectual and quotidian experience of Florentine life. The work also tackles broader intellectual issues such as the relationship between divine right and absolutism, humanism's relationship to Christianity, the reception of Machiavellian realpolitik, the construction of patronage networks, and the relationship between religious reform and government. |
