Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence

In the Preface to Giovanni and Lusanna, Gene Brucker describes his work as a “microhistory” (viii). Unlike traditional historical analyses, which focus on governments and larger political events (such as wars), microhistories often narrate the circumstances of an individual’s life in a certain historical period. As a result, microhistories demonstrate what it was like to live in that person’s society. Microhistories often focus on individuals from classes or groups that are underrepresented in traditional history books, such as “peasants, artisans, vagabonds [...] [and others] from the lower echelons of the social order” (ix). 

Giovanni and Lusanna is a historical book that recounts a legal trial in Florence that occurred during the mid-1400s. The two central figures of the trial are the plaintiff, Lusanna di Girolamo, and the defendant, Giovanni di Ser Lodovico della Casa. Lusanna alleges that she and Giovanni secretly married before Giovanni married another Florentine woman, making Giovanni guilty of bigamy—the crime of being married to two people at once.

In Chapter 1, Brucker describes the societal context of the trial and introduces each of the major figures. Brucker learns of the trial through his research in the Florentine archives of the notary