ABSTRACT
This paper examines a paradox: how the terms ‘Renaissance despot’ and ‘Renaissance despotism’, widespread in the historical literature on Italy 12501500 in the Anglophone world since at least the 1870s, are now increasingly called into question as valid historical concepts to describe the signorial regimes of the city states of north and central Italy. Indeed, in the recent Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance the terms ‘despots’ and ‘despotism’ are given only in inverted commas. The blurb for one of the contributors reads: ‘Dr Law’s interest in late medieval and Renaissance Italy covers such subjects as Venice and its empire, the growth of the territorial state, “despots”, Italian courts, and the “discovery” of the Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century.’1 Even more recently, in a chapter on ‘Governments and Governance’, John Najemy writes: ‘Modern historians have tempered the harsh judgement that once damned the signori as tyrants (without necessarily seeing them as benevolent fathers), and it is no longer fashionable to call them despots.’2
