Glory and Infamy: Making the Memory of Duke Alessandro de' Medici in Renaissance Florence
Item
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Title
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Glory and Infamy: Making the Memory of Duke Alessandro de' Medici in Renaissance Florence
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1c88f7fd5cc2:11351
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identifier
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11717
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Creator
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Robey, Tracy E.,
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Contributor
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Margaret L. King
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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European history | Alessandro de' Medici | archives | Florence | historiography | memory | Renaissance
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Abstract
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Duke Alessandro de' Medici (1512-1537, r. 1531-1537) was the victim of a previously unknown and far-reaching conspiracy to condemn him in posthumous histories and erase him from the archives of Florence. This cultural manipulation cast Duke Alessandro for the past 500 years as a tyrant, murderer, and rapist of nuns. The case study of how later dukes, historians, and archivists defamed Alessandro de' Medici illustrates the ways people made and destroyed memory in sixteenth-century Florence. The first chapter outlines the negative statements made about Duke Alessandro in the major histories that discuss his reign. The second chapter explores the political affiliations of the contemporary authors who wrote the histories used in the first chapter. I show that the historians' opposition to Alessandro's rule during his lifetime influenced what they eventually wrote about the Duke in their histories---a fact overlooked by scholars, who tend to almost wholly rely on the histories. The third chapter outlines the neglected concept and practice of damnatio memoriae, or condemnation of memory, in the Renaissance. Using poems, paintings, and rumors, I demonstrate how unknown Florentines secretly marginalized the memory of Duke Alessandro using objects intended to commemorate him. The fourth chapter explores how Alessandro's successor, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574, r. 1537-1574), feuded with Alessandro during his life, and constructed the Florentine archives in such a way that Alessandro's reign is excluded from both the Medici family archives and Medici ducal archives. No corpus of archival documents exists that could correct the slander spread by the official historians. Anonymous citizens, politically-active historians, and later Medici Grand Dukes effectively obliterated all good memory of Duke Alessandro de' Medici within 100 years of his assassination.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
