Education:
B.A., 2002, Michigan State University
M.A., 2003, Northwestern University
Ph.D., 2008, Northwestern University
About Dr. Maxson:
Dr. Maxson’s research focuses on medieval and early modern Europe, especially the Italian Renaissance. He is a current articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly and co-organizer of both the online ePublic of Letters and the more regionally based Appalachian Premodernists. His work has been funded by the American Philosophical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Fulbright Program, and others. Over a six-month period between 2022 and 2023 he published four different books, including A Short History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, which seeks to offer an updated, accessible and interdisciplinary introduction to that important city. He is currently working on a new project focused on the creation and influence of the idea of the Italian Renaissance in the United States from the fifteenth century to the present. Dr. Maxson maintains profiles on X (formerly Twitter) and keeps an updated profile on academia.edu: https://etsu.academia.edu/BrianMaxson
Areas of Academic Specialty
Europe between 1050 and 1700
Political, diplomatic, cultural, and social history Italy
Selected Publications:
Books:
Florence in The Early Modern World
Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within which the experience of Florence remains unique. By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbours, this collection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere towards Florence. New techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the connections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe. This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance.
Languages of Power in Italy (1300-1600)
The essays in this collection explore the languages – artistic, symbolic, and ritual, as well as written and spoken – in which power was articulated, challenged, contested, and defended in Italian cities and courts, villages, and countryside, between 1300 and 1600. Topics addressed include court ceremonial, gossip and insult, the performance of sanctity and public devotions, the appropriation and reuse of imagery, and the calculated invocation (and sometimes undermining) of authoritative models and figures. The collection balances a broad geographic and chronological range with a tight thematic focus, allowing the individual contributions to engage in vigorous and fruitful debate with one another even as they speak to some of the central issues in current scholarship. The authors recognize that every institutional action is, in its context, a political act, and that no institution operates disinterestedly. At the same time, they insist on the inadequacy of traditional models, whether Marxian or Weberian, as the complex realities of the early modern state pose tough problems for any narrative of modernization, rationalization, and centralization.
After Civic Humanism: New Approaches to Politics and Learning in Renaissance Italy
The thirteen essays in this volume demonstrate the multiplicity of connections between learning and politics in Renaissance Italy. Some engage explicitly with Hans Baron's "civic humanism" thesis illustrating its continuing viability, but also stretching its application to prove the limitations of its original expression. Others move beyond Baron's thesis to examine the actual practice of various individuals and groups engaged in both political and learned activities in a variety of diverse settings. The collective impression of all the contributions is that of a complex, ever-shifting mosaic of learned enterprises in which the well-examined civic paradigm emerges as just one of several modes that explain the interaction between learning and politics in Italy between 1300 and 1650. The model that emerges rejects any single category of explanation in favour of one that emphasizes variety and multiplicity. It suggests that learning was indispensible to all politics in Renaissance Italy and that, in fact, at its heart the Renaissance was a political event as much as a cultural movement.
The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence
This book offers a major contribution for understanding the spread and appeal of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence. Investigating the connections between the individuals who were part of the humanist movement, Brian Jeffrey Maxson reconstructs the networks that bound them together. Overturning the problematic categorization of humanists as either professional or amateurs, a distinction based on economics and the production of original works in Latin, he offers a new way of understanding how the humanist movement could incorporate so many who were illiterate in Latin, but who nonetheless were responsible for an important intellectual and cultural paradigm shift. The book demonstrates the massive appeal of the humanist movement across socio-economic and political groups and argues that the movement became so successful and so widespread because by the 1420s¬-30s the demands of common rituals began requiring humanist speeches. Over time, deep humanist learning became more valuable in the marketplace of social capital, which raised the status of the most learned humanists and helped disseminate humanist ideas beyond Florence.
Articles:
“The Failed Regime of Pope Adrian VI,” in The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy, c.1494-c.1559, edited by Alexander Lee and Brian Maxson (New York: Routledge, 2022), forthcoming.
“Introduction”, coauthored with Alexander Lee for The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy, c.1494-c.1559 (New York: Routledge, 2022).
“Portraits of Cardinals in Renaissance Florence,” in Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal, edited by Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 69-90.
“The Private, the Public, and Leonardo Bruni’s Responses to Lucca in 1431,” Rivista di Letteratura Storiografica Italiana 5 (2021): 29-46. English version with small tweaks to “Le chanceliers entre privé et public.”
“The Letters of Giannozzo Manetti with New Documents,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Italiano per il Medio Evo 122 (2020): 203-254.
“Les chanceliers entre privé et public: les réponses adressées par Leonardo Bruni à Lucques en 1431” translated into French by Clemence Revest for inclusion in L’humanisme au pouvoir? Figures de chanceliers dans l’Europe de la Renaissance (XVe-XVIe siècles) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020), pp. 153-76.
“The Myth of the Renaissance Bubble: International Culture and Regional Politics in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in Florence in the Early Modern World, eds. Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 213-35.
“Where in the World was Renaissance Florence?,” co-written with Nicholas Scott Baker in Florence in the Early Modern World , eds. Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 1-18.
“Florence, Pius II, and Jacopo Piccinino in 1458: A Case-Study of Gifts and Status in Diplomacy,” in Languages of Power in Italy, 1300-1600, eds. Daniel Bornstein, Laura Gaffuri, and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Turnhout: Brepols Publishing, 2017).
“Diplomatic Oratory,” in Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: Texts in Translation (1350-1520),edited by Isabella Lazzarini and Monica Azzolini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Press, 2017).
“Giannozzo Manetti’s Oratio in funere Iannotii Pandolfini: Art, Humanism and Politics inFifteenth-Century Florence,” text by Brian Jeffrey Maxson, with edition of Latin texts by Stefano U. Baldassarri, Interpres 34 (2016): 79-142.
“The Lost Oral Performance: Giannozzo Manetti and Spoken Oratory in Venice in 1448,” in Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016), 84-96.
“The Certame Coronario as Performative Ritual,” in Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir, edited by Mark Jurdjevic and Rolf Strøm, pp. 137-63. Toronto: CRRS, 2016.
"The 'Schemes' of Piero de' Pazzi," coauthored with Oren Margolis. Journal of Medieval History (forthcoming in December 2015).
"The Ritual of Command: Humanism, Magic, and Liberty in Fifteenth-Century Florence," in After Civic Humanism, edited by Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson, 113-129. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015.
"Introduction" in After Civic Humanism, co-written with Nicholas Scott Baker, 15-30. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015.
"Claiming Byzantium: Papal Diplomacy, Biondo Flavio, and the Fourth Crusade," Studi Veneziani 68 (2013): 31-59 (published in 2015).
"Giannozzo Manetti, the King, and the Emperor" text by Brian Jeffrey Maxson, with textual edition by Stefano Baldassarri, Archivio Storico Italiano 177, no. 3 (2014): 513-69.
"Integration and Synergy of Research and Graduate Education in Science, Social Science, and the Humanities," coauthored with Drs. Cecilia McIntosh and Karin Bartoszuk, Critical Conversations: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (2014): 70-92.
"'This Sort of Men': the Vernacular and the Humanist Movement in Fifteenth-Century Florence," I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (Fall 2013): 257-271.
"Tester: A Story of Class, Academia, Punk Rock, and Generation X," in Generation X Professors Speak: Voices from Academia, ed. Elwood Watson, Marc Shaw, and John Kille (Meutchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 19-39 (written under the name "Malcolm Franklin")
"Establishing Independence: Ritual, Empire, and Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People," in Foundation, Dedication and Consecration Rituals in Early Modern Culture, ed. Maarten Delbeke, Jan de Jong, and Minou Schraven, 79-98 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
"The Many Shades of Praise: Politics and Panegyrics in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Diplomacy," in Rhetorik in Mittelalter und Renaissance: Konzepte – Praxis – Diversität, ed. Georg Strack and Julia Knödler, 393-412 (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2011).
"Kings and Tyrants: Leonardo Bruni's translation of Xenophon's Hiero," Renaissance Studies 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 188-206.