Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence

Strocchia begins by examining the basic components of civic funerary rites and their symbolic meaning. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she then traces the changes and continuities of these rites throughout the Renaissance. She shows how the rise of funeral pomp in the late fourteenth century was linked to social mobility, the redistribution of wealth, corporate politics, and the psychology of the post-plague decades. She analyzes the impact of "elitism, statism and civism" on civic and family rites after 1400 and charts the social effects of rising consumption trends. And she focuses on the complex cycles of change stemming from both the establishment and rejection of Medici control, which by entrenching patrician domination helped pave the way for the Medici principate.