Guardians of Republicanism analyses the political and intellectual history of Renaissance Florence-republican and princely-by focusing on five generations of the Valori family, each of which played a dynamic role in the city's political and cultural life. The Valori were early and influential supporters of the Medici family, but were also crucial participants in the city's periodic republican revivals throughout the Renaissance. Mark Jurdjevic examines their political struggles and conflicts against the larger backdrop of their patronage and support of the Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, the radical Dominican prophet Girolamo Savonarola, and Niccolò Machiavelli, the premier political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Each of these three quintessential Renaissance reformers and philosophers relied heavily on the patronage of the Valori, who evolved an innovative republicanism based on a hybrid fusion of the classical and Christian languages of Florentine communal politics. Jurdjevic's study thus illuminates how intellectual forces-humanist, republican, and Machiavellian-intersected and directed the politics and culture of the Florentine Renaissance.

Mark Jurdjevic's profile page

Mark Jurdjevic was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. He earned a BA from the University of Toronto in 1996 and a PhD in early modern European history from Northwestern University in 2002. Between 2002-2004, he taught at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches early modern European history. He has published articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Past and Present, English Historical Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and is currently writing a study of Machiavelli's later political thought.