ABSTRACT
A few years ago, a discussion of Florence’s learned academies would have opened by describing Marsilio Ficino’s ‘Platonic academy’ as the forerunner of the later academies founded by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici to control the intellectual output of his new duchy. Now, however, the field is being transformed by the database of the early-modern Italian academies that Simone Testa has aptly called ‘the Facebook of the Renaissance’: the first network that enabled young people all over Italy to exchange intellectual ideas and have fun together, serio ludere, within the new republic of letters.1 So without detracting from the political function of academies in mediating Florence’s transition to the Medici principate, appreciation of their social role has added a new dimension to their importance in the early modern period.
