My book aims to provide detailed bibliography to introduce a research on Renaissance Siena, a capital town during that period.
After chapter I, on general literature and the specific one necessary to work on the governing elites of the coty and its State, I publish four more chapters. One on the Bank which produced a lot of reachness for the city (Monte dei Paschi) and other III-V on Cosimo I de Medici, first Granduke of Tuscany and his legislation, on University of Siena, and on the Tuscan legal provisions on Jews during the early modern period.
The importance of chapter 1 is to be stressed because it tells the story of researches along decades on Sienese institutions and particularly on the highest office of the Sienese Government, the Concistoro, which was the name of people seating in the office at the Palazzo della Signoria, now more known as Palazzo Pubblico, where the famous freschoes by ambrogio Lorenzetti on 'Buongoverno' are located.
Chapter 1 explains works for giving available to all researchers all over the world the names of those thousand people who will be listed in two following books now to be completed.
The book contains also a condensed profile of the author, with sites where it is possibile to find more information, starting with academia.edu, where people read many articles not covered by legal copyrights.
As the reader will see, Mario Ascheri is also a historia of law with international audience, and he has alo some work recently translated in english. First of all a History of Siena published by Routledge (with the collaboration of Bradley Franco, University of Portland), but also Laws of Italian Late Middle Ages, published by Brill.
Other essays concentrate on the problem of Republicanism, wich is very deeply debated in U.S.A. and Europe as well.
Ascheri sees the modern origins of the political constitutional life in the Italian towns of the XII-XV, because public life was there very remarkable. It is not the case to create a myth about them, but there is to recognize that their great artistic creations where in some way linked to the life reach of free discussions at least in some cases. Of course a medieval Republic is different from a contemporary one. But some values are tha same. Justice, political and economic Freedoms, Equality at least on the judiciary procedures...they are differently respected today and of course they were even more hardly recpected in that past, but the talks about them were not lost.
Siena gives an important exemple of that lost world.