About the Author:
Alison Williams Lewin began her education at Cornell Univeristy, pursuing studies in classics and neurobiology. After barely surviving organic chemistry, she switched to history and literature, graduating with distinction in all courses. Graduate studies began with an M.A. in Musicology at the University of Pittsburgh, then continued back at Cornell with an M.A. and then Ph.D. in Early Modern European History. As an associate professor of history at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Dr. Lewin teaches on topics ranging in time from antiquity to the French revolution. Current and projected research projects include a co-edited volume on chronicles of the Italian Renaissance, an edited translation of a fourteenth-century Sienese chronicle, and a biography of Pope Martin V.

Negotiating Survival illuminates the complex and often ambivalent agendas that shaped Florentine policy towards the papacy, contemporary Italian politics, and, ultimately, the city's inhabitants own view of themselves and their beloved republic. Contrary to the vision of the deliberately constructed "state as work of art" (in Jakob Burchkardt's famous phrase), close reading and analysis of the Consulte e Pratiche support the argument that external events and immediate crises drove the decision-making process in Florence, on the the Renaissance's wealthiest and self-conscious states. Though the long drawn-out wars with Milan in the late fourteenth century helped to shape some civic ideals, the development of an extremely practical, broad, and profound political awareness appears throughout the forty-year span of the Great Schism.