Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence

Updated with a new foreword by Margaret Meserve, Giovanni and Lusanna provides a fascinating view of Renaissance Florentine society and its attitudes on love, marriage, class, and gender. Lusanna was a beautiful woman from a middle-class background who, in 1455, brought suit against Giovanni, her aristocratic lover, when she learned he had contracted to marry a woman of his own class.

Blending scholarship with insightful narrative, the book portrays an extraordinary woman who challenged the unwritten codes and barriers of the social hierarchy and dared to seek a measure of personal independence in a male-dominated world.