This is the first study to propose that Europeans practiced neonatal infanticide on a large scale in the early modern era, based on careful examination of sex-ratios in southern Tuscany from the 16th to the 18th century. Published in... more
This is the first study to propose that Europeans practiced neonatal infanticide on a large scale in the early modern era, based on careful examination of sex-ratios in southern Tuscany from the 16th to the 18th century. Published in Quaderni Storici (in Italian) in 2003. The project, extended to France and to North America is ongoing and largely confirms this first research.
This new book examines the misadventure of young warmonger Duke Odoardo of Parma, keen to make his reputation in the Thirty Years’ War as an ally of France. In addition to constituting a rare study of the Italian theatre of Europe’s first... more
This new book examines the misadventure of young warmonger Duke Odoardo of Parma, keen to make his reputation in the Thirty Years’ War as an ally of France. In addition to constituting a rare study of the Italian theatre of Europe’s first Great War, it contains a soldier-by-soldier analysis of the duke’s army in detail unavailable for any country of the period. It also studies the impact of war and occupation on the duchy’s population through a close examination of parish registers in city and country. This work helps explain the gradual marginalization of Italian states with respect to great power politics of the modern era.
This small book constitutes a close anthropology of a single Tuscan village and the farms around it, during the space of two generations in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the first history book to apply the lessons of human and primate... more
This small book constitutes a close anthropology of a single Tuscan village and the farms around it, during the space of two generations in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the first history book to apply the lessons of human and primate ethology to a broad spectrum of behaviors, it studies the population taken as a collection of individuals with varying and often conflicting interests and temperaments. Underpinning the work is a wide variety of sources allowing the historian to examine these people and their predicaments in great detail. It studies in turn their governance, co-operation, competition, reproduction and invention.
The first single-author textbook (in any language) focusing on the long period between the Council of Trent and the French Revolution, this work constitutes a compendium of basic information about every area of Italy over those 250 years.... more
The first single-author textbook (in any language) focusing on the long period between the Council of Trent and the French Revolution, this work constitutes a compendium of basic information about every area of Italy over those 250 years. As a didactic text first and foremost, the content ranges from the geography of the peninsula, to the political, social, cultural and economic life manifested in city and country, with an eye to Italy’s relative position in Europe. It also constitutes a synthesis of Italian, French, British and North American scholarship over the last two generations.
Italian aristocrats were surprisingly numerous in the armies of Catholic powers throughout the sixteenth and a good part of the seventeenth century, in numbers not hitherto suspected. The book charts their activity in the framework of the... more
Italian aristocrats were surprisingly numerous in the armies of Catholic powers throughout the sixteenth and a good part of the seventeenth century, in numbers not hitherto suspected. The book charts their activity in the framework of the numerous wars from the Atlantic to the Middle East, in Flanders, Germany, Hungary, Italy and the Mediterranean. The precipitous decline in their numbers after about 1640 and their near-disappearance by the end of the 18th century constitutes one of the principal traits of Italian political life in modern times.
This study analyzes the cultural world of social elites in the small cities and towns of southwestern France over the broad seventeenth century. More concretely it examines in details the contours of daily life, social action, religious... more
This study analyzes the cultural world of social elites in the small cities and towns of southwestern France over the broad seventeenth century. More concretely it examines in details the contours of daily life, social action, religious belief and behavior among both Catholics and Protestants, the educational background of men and women, and the weight of tradition. All these were undermined by momentous shifts in the urban world-view at the extreme end of the century.
When the Duke of Parma, Odoardo Farnese, summoned his noble subjects to join his army with a view to joining the French alliance against Spain in 1635, he was gratified by a turnout of astonishingly high proportions. Not nearly enough... more
When the Duke of Parma, Odoardo Farnese, summoned his noble subjects to join his
army with a view to joining the French alliance against Spain in 1635, he was gratified by
a turnout of astonishingly high proportions. Not nearly enough of them had personal
experience of modern war, and so the prince appointed military nobles from much of
northern Italy to fill the cadres, alongside the French officers whose contingents on loan
from Louis XIII made up a third of the infantry. Unlike Spanish nobles, Odoardo’s
subjects were even willing to serve in the ranks, while waiting for their advancement.
The two brief campaigns turned out to be a disaster for Odoardo and his subjects. War
quickly receded from Parma’s horizon, but the experience reveals that Italy’s aristocrats
had not yet consigned their weapons to display cases.
