A lecture with Ada Palmer (University of Chicago)
Cosponsored by the Department of History
It is difficult today to imagine a world in which religious communities were deeply intertwined with the civic order and when a third of a town’s population might be priests, monks, and nuns. In Renaissance Florence the Dominican Monastery of San Marco was intimately tied to every aspect of city life, from commerce and patronage, to civil broils and foreign invasions, to education and medicine, to the great artists, architects and radical thinkers who earned the Florentine Renaissance its eternal fame. This lecture will explore the monastery’s role as a center of social and spiritual life.