Biography

Nicholas Scott Baker is a cultural and political historian of Renaissance Italy who has particular interest in the use of visual sources in historical research. He has published articles on political culture, violence, and sexuality in relation to the end of the Florentine Republic and the creation of the Medici principality in sixteenth-century Florence; and his first monograph The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480-1550, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013. He teaches early modern European history at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

Project Summary

This project explores understandings about the power of fortune, fate, chance, and luck in human lives in Renaissance Italy and the ways these beliefs influenced and were influenced by everyday behavior across a wide range of experiences: political, commercial, social, and intellectual.