Renaissances: J.G. Amato in Conversation with Prof. Anne E. Moyer

Speaker(s): J.G. Amato (Stanford Humanities Center Fellow) and Prof. Ann E. Moyer (History, University of Pennsylvania)

Graduate Research Series: J.G. Amato Presents "The Prince’s Likeness: Bishop Jacopo Guidi’s Life of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in Religious Historical Context" in Conversation with Prof. Anne E. Moyer (History, University of Pennsylvania)

Humanities Center Fellow J.G. Amato presents a dissertation chapter in Renaissances’ spring quarter iteration of the Graduate Research Series. Prof. Ann E. Moyer (History, University of Pennsylvania) offers a response. J.G. describes his work below:

Life writing was a powerful tool in early modern politics to make and re-make rulers’ legacies. An interesting case for sixteenth-century Florence was that of Bishop Jacopo Guidi who, after a career serving the Medici in secular diplomacy and the episcopate, set out to write a life of his patron. Although incomplete and never published, the manuscript Life draws on Guidi’s insider knowledge of Cosimo I and can be used to tell the story of both men, their intertwined fortunes and failures, and the development of the Tuscan church and state. [Courtesy of J.G. Amato]