Dr. Nicholas Baker
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Profile
Nicholas Baker is a cultural historian of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with particular interests in the political and economic cultures of Renaissance Italy, connections and exchanges between Italy and the Iberian world in the sixteenth century, and the use of visual sources in historical research. He has published widely on political culture in Florence in the first half of the sixteenth century, on gambling and other financial risk taking in Renaissance Italy and how these behaviors connected to ideas about the future, and global approaches to the Italian Renaissance. He currently working on a book project that aims to produce a microhistory examining the concurrent emergence of the first global economy with the invention of the idea of the Renaissance by tracing the lives of a family of merchants and art collectors in sixteenth-century Florence.
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Grants and Fellowships
Member, Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Historical Studies, Princeton NJ, Spring Term 2018
Jean-François Malle Fellow, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy, 2013-2014
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Grants and Fellowships
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Publications
Books
Monographs
In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480-1550 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Edited Books
Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives, co-edited with Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Routledge, 2020)
After Civic Humanism: Learning and Politics in Renaissance Italy, co-edited with Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015).
Book Chapters“The Prince’s Body: Imagining Regime Change in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy, c.1494-c.1559, ed. Alexander Lee and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Routledge, 2023): 134-165
“The Emperor and the Duke: Cosimo, Charles V, and the Negotiation of Sovereignty.” In Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574), ed. Alessio Assonitis and Henk van Veen (Leiden: Brill, 2022)
“Where in the World is Renaissance Florence? Challenges for the History of the City After the Global Turn” with Brian Jeffrey Maxson, in Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives, co-edited with Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Routledge, 2020): 1-17.
“’Tutto il mondo è paese’: Locating Florence in Pre-modern Eurasian Commerce” in Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives, edited by Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson (Routledge, 2020): 50-67.
Other“Putting a Price on the Throne of Saint Peter: Gambling and Commerce in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Journal of Modern History (forthcoming 2024)
“A Twenty-First-Century Renaissance.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 22, no. 2 (2019): 273-278
“Creating a Shared Past: The Representation of Medici-Habsburg Relations in the Wedding Celebrations for Eleonora de Toledo and Cosimo I de’ Medici.” Renaissance Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 397-416.
“Dux ludens: Eleonora de Toledo, Cosimo I de’ Medici, and Games of Chance in Ducal Household of Mid-Sixteenth-Century Florence.” European History Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2016): 595-617.
“Discursive Republicanism in Renaissance Florence: Deliberation and Representation in the Early Sixteenth Century.” Past and Present no. 225 (November 2014): 47-77.
“Medicean Metamorphoses: Carnival in Florence, 1513.” Renaissance Studies 25, no. 4 (2011): 491-510.
“Power and Passion in Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Sexual and Political Reputations of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (2010): 432-57.
“For Reasons of State: Political Executions, Republicanism, and the Medici in Florence, 1480-1560.” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2009): 444-78.
“Writing the Wrongs of the Past: Vengeance, Humanism, and the Assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 38, no. 2 (2007): 307-27.