Peter W. Sposato, Ph.D.

Phone:

765-455-9458

Email:

psposato@iu.edu

Website:

https://iuk.academia.edu/PeterSposato

Campus:

IU Kokomo

Biography

I am a social and cultural historian of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, with a particular interest in the city of Florence and the region of Tuscany. My early research centered on the intersection of elite violence and the powerful cultural and social forces that both shaped and valorized that violence: namely chivalric ideology and honor-shame. My approach was interdisciplinary, and I used a broad range of different kinds of evidence, including the institutional records produced by the Florentine government and courts and works of imaginative literature and chronicles. This research resulted in my first book, Forged in the Shadow of Mars: Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Florence, published by Cornell University Press in 2022. The book challenges the current understanding of elite culture in late medieval Florence by arguing that chivalric ideology, traditionally considered by scholars to be foreign to the social and cultural landscape of late medieval Italian cities, played a major role in shaping the mentality and behavior of many Florentine elites, especially members of ancient lineages. Given the close connection between chivalry and violence, these Florentine ‘chivalric elites’ asserted an identity and embraced a lifestyle which was quite distinct from that of the merchants and bankers with whom they competed for political power and economic resources. For example, Florentine chivalric elites eagerly cultivated the profession of arms, choosing to base their identities and livelihoods on warfare rather than on more lucrative and pacific professions. They also readily used violence against their peers to assert and defend their honor and against 'commoners' to reinforce their claims to superior social status and authority. While many scholars have studied this violence, Forged in the Shadow of Mars is the first to analyze its ideological underpinnings and connection to chivalric ideology. In short, this book offers the first examination of chivalric culture and its practitioners, who played an important, but understudied role in the transformation of Florence into the dominant territorial state in north-central Italy. Its implications, however, extend far beyond the Florentine city walls. It also offers an important corrective to traditionally held assumptions about the nature of elite violence in medieval Italian cities and challenges the prevailing view that the Italian communal elites were a homogeneous group animated by a proto-capitalistic, civic ideology. You can find reviews of my book in Renaissance Quarterly, The Medieval Review, and History: Reviews of New Books, or at https://iuk.academia.edu/PeterSposato.

My current book project focuses on identity formation among marginalized elites in fourteenth and fifteenth century Florence, a process which involved holding military offices in the contado, providing advice to the Florentine government on military matters, and, perhaps most importantly, cultivating military careers. It also considers how these men asserted their claimed identities in perpetuity, mainly through the commissioning of tomb effigies and funerary monuments with clear knightly or military themes. While in other parts of Europe these martial activities and acts of commemoration were central pillars of the dominant brand of elite identity, in Florence they were often more closely associated with elites who found themselves at the margins of Florentine politics and economically disadvantaged.

Education

Ph.D. in Medieval and Early Modern History

• University of Rochester, New York

M.A. in History 

• University of Rochester, New York

Teaching

I teach courses on a range of topics spanning the history of Europe and the Mediterranean World in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

Research Interests

Medieval and Renaissance Europe and the Mediterranean World; history of violence; societal impact of warfare; economics of war; chivalry; identity formation and cultural communities

Representative Publications

I have published articles in several different journals, including: Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, History Compass, and Medieval Prosopography, as well as chapters in volumes published Brill and Boydell. See my Academia.edu profile for more information.

Forged in the Shadow of Mars: Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Florence (Cornell University Press, 2022)