Virtue, Honour and Mischief: The Role of Youthful Disobedience in Civic Humanism and Masculinity in the Florentine Renaissance

Abstract

This thesis explores the subversive world of male youths in Florence between the mid-fourteenth century and 1530. Whereas historians have emphasised the conservative foundations of Renaissance ‘virtue’ and ‘honour’ – values such as piety, thrift, self-restraint and political participation – this thesis evokes the ways in which unorthodox means of civic engagement were tolerated, and indeed celebrated, when perpetrated by young males for the benefit of the city. Through public ridicule, unauthorised violence and extra-marital sexuality, young males asserted themselves within the Florentine Republic, and this thesis highlights how that culture’s laudation of such dissident behaviour reflected its interpretation of civic humanism.