Books like The Black Prince of Florence

This was another book that really inspired my choice of profession. Located in the northeast corner of the Italian peninsula, Friuli emerges as something like the wild west of Renaissance Italy in this engrossing study.

Far removed from the urbane cities and courts and the worlds of art and literature commonly associated with the Renaissance, Edward Muir reveals the continuing binds of feudal obligation, family, vengeance, and honor, and the violence they provoked in the early sixteenth century. Incidentally, the history he tells also encounters the real-life origins of the story that would become Romeo and Juliet.

Like Trexler, Muir explores the power of ritual in Renaissance Italian life, but rather than rituals of community and government, he focuses in this book on the rituals of aversion and violence.

This book, more than any other, inspired me to become a historian of Renaissance Italy.

Richard Trexler reveals that, far from being secular minded, the inhabitants of Florence relied on religion, ritual behavior, and charisma to create and maintain urban life, social values, and civic order.

By turns anthropological as well as historical, Trexler uncovers the ritual behaviors and practices that tied the city together from the level of the cosmos to the everyday relations between friends, neighbors, and family members. The central purpose of all public ritual in Florence served to overcome the inherent weakness of a republican government in a world of gods and kings. 

This book presents six vignettes of sex and violence plucked by Thomas Cohen from the archives of the papal governor of sixteenth-century Rome.

I love Cohen’s passion for telling a good story without losing sight of its broader historical significance. Examining the everyday lives of people in the streets, Cohen reveals how a clash between the contradictory currents of Italian Renaissance society fueled much of its conflicts and discontents.

On the one hand, Christian religion preached mercy, forgiveness, and community, on the other the compelling codes of honor, familial loyalty, and unwritten social rules promoted violence and vengeance.

The book also reveals how women and other socially marginalized figures could navigate and manipulate these codes to find space and freedom in a world dominated by powerful men. 

When we think of the Renaissance, we often think of the names of famous artists or writers and the lives of governors of Italian cities.

In this book, Sarah Ross argues for the existence of "everyday renaissances," demonstrating that an interest in and concern of classical antiquity permeated far deeper into the social strata than we previously understood. She demonstrates how classical education and literature mattered to ordinary men and women of the artisanal and mercantile classes, perhaps even more than it did to members of the cultural elite.

She argues that even the most tangential association with culture and learning could help social mobility. I think this is a fascinating examination of how apparently elite cultural concerns can matter to ordinary people and be mobilized by them.

Oreo (originally published in 1974, then out of print, and finally repopularized by Harriette Mullen and republished in 2000), a satirical novel by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor, is widely considered to be “before its time.” This aching and hilarious, experimentally structured story is about a girl, Oreo, with a Jewish father and a Black mother, who ventures to New York City to find her father only to discover there are hundreds of Sam Schwartzes in the phonebook, and then goes on a quest to find him.

This is one of the strongest survivors I've met in historical fiction. I related to Gussie feeling like an outsider in her family, though for different reasons. I’m a mixed-race woman of Latina, Asian, and Anglo roots, and grew up bouncing between family members in an ethnic patchwork of neighborhoods. Like Gussie, I don’t look or act like anyone in my family—or anywhere.

Like Gussie, I’ve never conformed to society’s expectations of “ladies.” Some see my opinionated, independent, wandering nature as masculine—again, like Gussie. Her confidence, adventurousness, and determination are qualities I’ve cultivated with gusto. Her loneliness feels familiar, but it clarifies the bonds she creates and her loyalty to those she loves. Though most folks in Gussie’s world consider her plain, I find her beautiful.

By the time I reached Native Guard’s central crown of sonnets, Trethewey already had me with her blues poem and palindrome.

I love the formal-mindedness of this collection—also its authority and fearlessness. I admire the way Trethewey unites personal history (the speaker’s memories of childhood; her experience as a woman of color; her mother’s tragic death) and collective history (the unremembered Native Guard; systemic racism; the legacies of slavery and the Civil War).

Her poems help us ask the big questions together: what memories are held or erased by a community of people? How might collective grief inform private grief and vice versa? What happens if our stories are not remembered, and what work can writing do to help us not forget? And also: “Incident” is one of the best pantoums out there.

I fell in love with T.J. Jones, who is a gifted athlete, but an outcast because he’s multi-racial in a white community. After a rocky start, he’s landed in a loving adoptive family and has learned this kind of wisdom: “…I learned...that the color of a person’s skin has to do only with where their way-long-ago ancestors originated, so my mind tells me all racists are either ignorant or so down on themselves they need somebody to be better than.” 

I couldn’t help but root for this unlikely hero who stands up to racism and bullying while training like the dickens to be the best swimmer ever. This is among my favorite stories, but I say that every time I finish one of Crutcher’s books (that's why I included two).  

For me, Wilson’s book provides an engaging first-hand account of a young mixed-race barrister’s entry into, what is still, a predominantly white, privately-educated, profession. What prompted her to become the barrister was the senseless murder of her cousin on a London street. Her book is easy-to-read and packed with personal anecdotes from her early years as a barrister. She also discusses her encounters with unconscious racism in the profession, with a focus on how she was able to deal with it. An inspirational book for anyone thinking of becoming a UK barrister. 

We all know of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters who, before the Civil War, left their South Carolina home and became well-known abolitionists in the North.

But the family also included their brother Henry, a brutal, slave-holding man, his three children by Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman in his household, and their descendants. Two brothers became part of the post-Civil War Black elite and one descendant, Angelina Weld Grimké, made a name for herself as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance.

In addition to reexamining the legacy of Sarah and Angelina, author Kerri Greenidge reminds readers how families were formed under the sword of slavery and that recovery from its wounds is incomplete, even today.