Introduction : regimes and regime change in Italy, c.1494-c.1559 / Alexander Lee and Brian Jeffrey Maxson -- Regime change in Sabaudian lands, 1536-1580 / Matthew Vester -- Memories and fantasies of regime change in Spanish Naples / Stephen Cummins -- Chutes and ladders : the twilight of two Lombard families in the Italian Wars / John Gagné -- Regime change in Papal Rome : Pius IV and the Carafa (1559-61) / Miles Pattenden -- The vacant See and regime change in Papal Rome, 1503-1559 / John M. Hunt -- The failed regime of Pope Adrian VI / Brian Jeffrey Maxson -- The prince's body : imagining regime change in mid sixteenth-century Florence / Nicholas Scott Baker -- The historiography of regime change in Machiavelli's Discursus reum florentinarum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices / Alexander Lee -- Alda Pio Gambara and regime change in Brescia during the Italian Wars / Stephen D. Bowd -- Success in a silent regime change : electoral politics, family strategies, and the Cappello family in early sixteenth-century Venice / Monique O' Connell -- In the name of the marquis, by the hand of the marchioness : epistolary networks and languages of resilience and reaction in Mantua during the League of Cambrai (1509-1510) / Isabella Lazzarini -- Trading and investing during regime changes in Genoa / Carlo Taviani.
"This volume offers the first comprehensive survey of regime change in Italy in the period c.1494-c.1559. Far from being a purely modern phenomenon, regime change was a common feature of life in Renaissance Italy - no more so than during the Italian Wars (1494-1559). During those turbulent years, governments rose and fell with dizzying regularity. Some changes of regime were peaceful; others were more violent. But whenever a new reggimento took power, old social tensions were laid bare and new challenges emerged - any of which could easily threaten its survival. This provoked a variety of responses, both from newly established regimes and from their opponents. Constitutional reforms were proposed and enacted; civic rituals were developed; works of art were commissioned; literary works were penned; and occasionally, aspects of material culture were pressed into service, as well. Comparative in approach and broad in scope, it offers a provocative new view of the diverse political, culture, and economic factors which ensured the survival (or demise) of regimes - not only in 'major' polities like Florence, Rome, and Venice, but also in less-well studied regions like Savoy. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in cultural, military and political history"--