Macquarie University

Faculty Member, Modern History, Politics, and International Relations

About

Nicholas Scott Baker is a cultural and political historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in Renaissance Italy and the use of visual sources in historical research. He has published on political culture, violence, and sexuality in relation to the end of the Florentine Republic and the creation of the Medici principality in sixteenth-century Florence; and has a book manuscript on the subject currently under review. He has recently begun two new research projects. The first has the tentative (and very dull) working title of "A History of Chance in Renaissance Italy" and explores gambling and beliefs about fate, fortune, and chance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian culture and society. The second prospectively titled "Thinking Like a State: Cosimo I de' Medici and the Practice of Sovereignty in Sixteenth-Century Europe" seeks to de-center the state from narratives of early modern politics by examining how sovereignty and governance worked in practice during the reign of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Tuscany. As a long-term project, he is also developing a political biography of Cosimo I de' Medici.

Select Publications

"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.

“The Death of a Heretic, Florence 1389.” In Rituals, Images, and Words: The Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by F.W. Kent and Charles Zika: 33-53. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

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