Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Francis Kent was working on a retirement opus, a biography of Lorenzo the Magnificent, at the time of his unfortunate diagnosis with cancer in 2008 and his subsequent passing in 2010.In a moving and fitting tribute to this archival master, Carolyn James of Monash University has collected and edited a series of essays, mostly previously published, that served as preparatory and complementary materials to this grand biographical project.These essays form a cohesive whole that is almost biographical, which places Lorenzo's unique character into the deeply social and political Florentine world in which he grew up, ascended to power, and became Il Magnifico.Kent's archival work is masterful, and the essays are based on a career's reading of Laurentian and Medicean correspondence, administrative records, petitions, and other documents.Princely Citizen ranges far and wide in Lorenzo's life, connecting the disparate threads of his upbringing, the women in his life, his artistic patronage, and his increasingly autocratic politics to the development of the Medici regime and Lorenzo's sure-footed navigation of its complexities.The first three essays in Princely Citizen portray the young Lorenzo as born to rule, always preparing for power but uncomfortable with his future role.Kent makes the case effectively that Lorenzo really began actively preparing to take the reins of power upon the death of his grandfather, Cosimo de' Medici, in 1464, though he had been introduced to the practice of patronage even earlier.Lorenzo's well-known romantic side (Kent describes Lorenzo scaling the walls of the convent of Le Murate to prove its nuns' chastity) was also a political tool, as his dealings with the wives of powerful Florentine men are revealed to be as calculated as his shrewdest business deals.However, Kent argues that Lorenzo was also a truly romantic man, whose life was shaped to a great extent by two major love affairs: with Lucrezia Donati, his youthful amore, and with Bartolommea Nasi, the patrician wife of Giovanni Benci with whom Lorenzo was involved in the 1480s.Lorenzo, Kent argues, favoured women who were intelligent and articulate, who did not adhere to the contemporary Florentine advice that women should remain silent and domestic.Kent's third
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".