ABSTRACT
Florentine writers such as Poggio Bracciolini, Giannozzo Manetti, and Matteo Palmieri made use of transcontinental political and literary discourses that defied their city’s regional political reach. The centrality of Florence to Italian Renaissance studies has helped the Florentine experience shape common generalizations about the changes wrought by sixteenth-century political events. This chapter argues that a reassessment of the reach of fifteenth-century Florentine culture and politics offers a different perspective. The Italian Renaissance has traditionally been associated with the artistic and literary cultural efflorescence of northern Italy, especially Florence, beginning in the late 1300s. If the bubble of the traditional, Florence-centered narrative of the Renaissance is replaced with a transnational, interconnected Europe, then a different picture of Poggio Bracciolini’s sojourn in England emerges. Far from leaving a cultural bubble in northern Italy, Poggio was entering into a transalpine cultural stage that could, at some level at least, appreciate his stylistic talents.
