“A name,” Bernardine of Siena declares, “is a famosa notitia,“ a public statement.’ In this paper I review the stock of personal names, and, implicitly, the public statements, associated with the men of women of Florence and of Tuscany, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The justifications for this enterprise are two. The surviving sources give overwhelming attention to the rich and powerful; they pay little heed to the poor and lowly. Inevitably, they yield an unbalanced view of Tuscan society. But if in most respects the humble are voiceless, they do bear personal names; they do make, in Bernardine's phrase, public statements.

Moreover, as Bernardine implies, a name is far more than a bland identifier. It is rather a pointer, that directs our gaze in three directions. Its principal and unvarying function is to identify a particular man or woman. It bestows individuality; it ensouls. But names may also recall the past; often, they convert living persons into memorials to the dead.

Giotto's fresco cycles of the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention as the vast fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel. Scholars have analyzed the space depicted in the frescoes, the striking monumentality of the figures, and the depiction of architecture oblique to the picture plane; thematic content, however, has received less attention than form and space. In this essay, I will propose some religious and secular iconographic and thematic unities: themes of rebirth, resurrection, and communitas, which correlate with fourteenth-century Florentine attitudes toward wealth, historiography, and a belief in the spiritual role of the earthly city. The themes of the frescoes articulate the social and political structures of early fourteenth-century civic life, as Giotto transformed traditional subjects into images of contemporary significance in these frescoes.

When in 1625 Gabriel Naudé wished to clear the name of Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) from the pious slanders of the demonologists of the intervening century, he argued that this learned man, “who was not only a new Trismegistus in the three higher faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine, but who desired to travel in body through every part of Europe, and to exercise his mind on all sciences and disciplines,” deserved better than to be abused with stories “which would be much more appropriate in the magical tales of Merlin, Maugis, and of Doctor Faust, than in writings which are (or rather should be) serious and well-examined… . “ Naudé's words provide an accurate anticipation of the three principal reasons for the interest of modern scholars in the writings of this enigmatic humanist and magician.

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.