Thinking Politics in the Vernacular

The presence of innumerable political genres and texts, written in vernacular languages, affects the traditional historiographical framework and poses new problems about political ideas in Middle Ages and Humanism. The exchange of knowledge and arguments, the interactions between the diverse genres, the birth of new cognitive contexts linked with laity, the creation of new cultural forms – all these are just a few of the different levels which reflect the importance of vernacular languages in the medieval political thought. The contributors have been confronted with very different scenarios, geographical areas and periods of time. In this collection, and in the conference that preceded it, we have aimed further to complicate the historiographical scene of political thought in the Middle Ages and Humanism by adding a few core concepts and taking into consideration a wider range of texts and by identifying new paths and research propositions.