Citizens, subjects, and scholars: The Valori family in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480--1608

My dissertation examines the writings and careers of five generations of the Valori family, a prominent lineage of Renaissance Florence. For over a century and a half, the Valori struggled with the chronic and central question of republican community and politics: how to establish a system of public ethics that would inculcate virtue in the citizenry and thus strengthen and safeguard the republic? Each generation of the family insisted on the same combination of traditional ascetic Christian reform and the secular principles of classical antiquity as complementary and crucial discourses for the preservation of civil society. The particular combination they espoused was the result of family loyalties and tradition: during the last two decades of the fifteenth century, the Valori established lasting and influential friendships with the millenarian and republican Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola and with Europe's leading Neoplatonic philosopher, Marsilio Ficino.;From the late fifteenth century onwards, the Valori family struggled to integrate and render compatible the rival intellectual reform programs advocated by Savonarola and Ficino. Throughout the sixteenth century and well after Savonarola had been excommunicated by Alexander VI and burned at the stake, the Valori family strove to rehabilitate the Savonarolan tradition in the post-republican world of the Medici dukes, beginning a development that continues today with the Dominican order's campaign to have Savonarola canonized. Savonarolism remained a powerful discourse to express religious and political criticism of society throughout the entire sixteenth century. At the same time, the Valori family actively defended and patronized Neoplatonic philosophy, often in the face of powerful criticism. The dissertation presents notarial and family documents, previously unexamined, that show that relations between Marsilio Ficino and the Valori became closer as public criticism of Platonism, particularly by Savonarola, mounted. The dissertation also presents several documents that have gone unnoticed by scholars of Neoplatonism in its sixteenth-century history. The family's defense of Ficino and support for Neoplatonism constitutes a crucial link in the transmission of Neoplatonism from Marsilio Ficino's Florence in the late fifteenth century to transalpine Europe in the sixteenth.