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The Element analyses the critical importance of elite women to the conflict conventionally known as the Italian Wars that engulfed much of Europe and the Mediterranean between 1494 and 1559. Through its considered attention to the interventions of women connected to imperial, royal and princely dynasties, the authors show the breadth and depth of the opportunities, roles, impact, and influence that certain women had to shape the course of the conflict in both wartime activities and in peace-making. The work thus expands the ways in which the authors can think about women's participation in war and politics. It makes use of a wide range of sources such as literature, art and material culture, as well as more conventional text forms. Women's voices and actions are prioritized in making sense of evidence and claims about their activities.
An overview of representations in church decoration, legal texts, romances, chronicles, and political allegories – notwithstanding the differences of these contexts – can help us to recognize additional patterns. On one end of the spectrum, we find the question of religious imagery. In Last Judgement scenes naked female (and male) figures are represented in large numbers. Physical aggression against the human body is explicit and, in this respect, women suffer violence comparable to sodomites. The use of force is endorsed. Although the imagery is intended to denounce lustful acts, the paintings themselves effectively promote sex crimes. This subversive scenario can lead to the sanitization of the violent encounter between women and their tormentors (missing in the case of sodomites). The two political allegories in Padua and Siena mark the other end of the spectrum. I would like to believe that Giotto di Bondone’s Injustice comes closest to a universal denunciation of rape. Here the display of the naked female victim reinforces the explicit rendering of sexual aggression. The scene is carefully contextualized, which discards sanitizing readings. The radicalism of this fresco is striking even compared to Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s War, where, instead of nudity, an equally general denunciation relies on the indicators of bridal status and abduction. Because of its reference to marriage, Lorenzetti’s work is closer to patriarchal structures than Giotto’s. Nevertheless, these two allegories constitute the pinnacle of visualizing civic political thought in the epoch and sketch the utopia of a rape-free society.
The great political figures who dominated public life in the second half of the fourth century B.C. initiated and directed a policy of military conquest. During First Samnite War, the Samnites attacked the Sidicini, and the Campanians. The subsequent alliance with Naples was Rome's first success of the Second Samnite War, which had formally begun a few months previously, in late 327 or early 326. After the consolidation of 313-312 B.C. the outcome of the Second Samnite War was no longer in doubt. In the years that followed the Romans were able to extend the scope of their military activities to other parts of Central Italy. By making an alliance with the Lucanians, who had been attacked by the Samnites, the Romans provoked the so-called Third Samnite War. During the period of the Italian wars between 338 and 264 B.C. the characteristic political, social and economic structures of the classical Republic began to take shape.
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