David Rosenthal

Kings of the Street: Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence David Rosenthal

Publisher Marketing: For more than a century the artisans and labourers of Renaissance Florence turned the city into their own 'empire' during times of public festivity. From the republic of the late 1400s through to the grand duchy of the early seventeenth century, up to forty brigades of men called the potenze, or powers, elected kings, carved out territories, and entered into a dialogue with citizens and with their Medici patrons. This study traces the rise and fall of this carnivalesque subculture for the first time. It describes how workers represented themselves, their neighbourhoods, and their trades on the public stage through rituals such as stone-fighting and jousting, and reveals how the politics of this festive world were closely linked to everyday patterns of social bargaining around the person of the prince. In the early 1600s the micro-states of the potenze were partially suppressed and they gradually disappeared from the Florentine urban stage. The account of this transformation presented here shows how Tridentine reform and economic crisis combined to undermine hypermasculine carnival ritual as a language of civic contract, confining the potenze to making pilgrimages to shrines and convents in the Florentine countryside. At the same time it is shown how economic and religious change empowered groups of artisan women to take up the model of the potenze in order to make their own collective pilgrimages outside the city walls. Through the story of the potenze, this book provides fresh insights into the dynamics of class and gender relations, and the nature of agency, in early modern Italy. Contributor Bio:  Rosenthal, David David M. Rosenthal received his Ph. D. in counselor education from the State University of New York at Buffalo. For 23 years, he was a faculty member at the University of Iowa, teaching in the Colleges of Medicine, Public Health, and Education. Dr. Rosenthal was named Teacher of the Year by residents in the Department of Family Medicine and was given the College of Medicine Service Award. He was also the Director of Counseling and Health Promotion Services at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Later he became the Director of La Bodega de La Familia in New York City. Dr. Rosenthal has also written a number of professional articles and books. With Dr. Michael Teague and David Gould, he produced a series of award-winning videos focusing on health. He also produced and co-directed, with Steven Henke, two award-winning video documentaries about Native Americans in South Dakota. Dr. Rosenthal has been a licensed marriage and family therapist and served as president of the Iowa Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. He has given more than 100 presentations in the United States and has conducted workshops in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Russia, and Greece. Dr. Rosenthal was also Executive Director of the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center in Manhattan and an adjunct faculty member in the College of Education at Brooklyn College. He is currently a faculty member at Columbia University where he works with Family Medicine Residents and graduate students at the Mailman School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of two non-profit organizations: Heritage Health and Housing and Kwah Dao. David and his wife, Jane, enjoy living in New York City and spending time with their children, Daniel (and wife, Courtney) and Rebecca (and husband, Chris) and their six grandchildre--Isaac, Darby, Emily, Cyrus, Max, and Hazel.