This book explores the decision of Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici to create a ghetto in Florence, and explains how a Jewish community developed out of that forc

In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a

For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a fre

Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the sevente

Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuri