History of the Italian Republics of the Middle Ages, Vol. 12

Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de SismondiProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
670K words
Chapters
67

Tags

World History Medieval PoliticsRepublic SystemCity-State RivalryPolitical SystemRise and FallPower GameHistorical CompilationAcademic MonographItalian City-StatesEuropean History

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Storia delle repubbliche italiane dei secoli di mezzo, v. 12 (of 16) by SismondiAuthor: Sismondi, J.-C.-L. Simonde de (Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde), 1773-1842,Language: Italian, Class: DG: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Italy, Vatican City, Malta, Release Date: Nov 12, 2013

Editor's review

This volume is the twelfth of Sismondi's sixteen-volume history of the Italian republics in the Middle Ages, presented in the original Italian as an electronic reset of a public-domain historical work. Its value lies first in the organization of sources and the narrative tradition: the author traces the rise and fall of the republics, linking city-state politics, military conflict and institutional change, in prose marked by the broad vision and moral judgments characteristic of nineteenth-century historiography. As one volume of a multi-volume work, it is not an introduction but a continuous text for researchers and committed readers to work through volume by volume. It offers a way of situating the city-states within a larger regional framework, and helps in understanding the narrative line of medieval Italian political life. This edition is released by Project Gutenberg, easy to search and carry, and suited as a working copy for checking against the print edition and for notes and excerpts. Note that the original is in Italian and the work is early; its historical outlook and phrasing bear the marks of its time, so it should be read alongside modern scholarship rather than as the sole authority.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and the opening remarks first to establish the time span and sequence of events covered by this volume, then proceed to the text.
  2. Keep maps and a chronology at hand for cross-reference, and mark places where city-states and figures change frequently.
  3. Compare with modern research on medieval Italian history and note where the author's judgments have been revised by later scholarship.
  4. When reading the electronic edition, use bookmarks and annotations to build an index of people and city-states for easy reference.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67

FAQ

Is this book in the original Italian? What language level is needed? According to the data, the language is Italian, and this is one volume of Sismondi's multi-volume original. A level sufficient to read nineteenth-century Italian scholarly prose is advisable, at least the ability to handle long sentences and historical terms with a dictionary; otherwise progress will be difficult.
Can Volume 12 be read on its own, or must one start from Volume 1? It is one volume of a sixteen-volume work, and the narrative continues from the preceding volumes. Read alone, it lacks the groundwork and background of earlier figures; it is best to know the structure of the whole work and the main threads of the earlier volumes, or to treat it as one stage in a volume-by-volume reading plan.
Does this edition have modern notes or a bibliography? The data only states that it is a public-domain eBook released by Project Gutenberg and mentions no modern notes, introduction or bibliography. Treat it as the original text; for scholarly citation and verification of facts, consult a critical edition or modern research.
The work is early; what should readers keep in mind? Sismondi lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his narrative carries the historical outlook and moral judgments of that era. Read with a comparative awareness, set his judgments against later scholarship, appreciate the organization of the narrative, and do not take its evaluations as settled conclusions.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi Author · Swiss · 1773–1842

Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842) was a Swiss economist and historian born in Geneva. He engaged in commerce in his early years before turning to scholarship. He is known for his multi-volume History of the Italian Republics of the Middle Ages, which narrates the political vicissitudes of the Italian republics century by century and exerted an intellectual influence on the Italian Risorgimento. In economics, he wrote New Principles of Political Economy, which criticized laissez-faire doctrine and advocated state intervention to safeguard the welfare of the people, earning him recognition as a representative figure of economic romanticism. His works combine careful historical scholarship with a critical, at times polemical, tone. The collection includes twelve of his works, mostly different volumes of the above-mentioned history.