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Chapter Three describes the Milanese dukes' desire for imperial recognition of their right to absolute powers, beginning with Giangaleazzo Visconti, created duke in 1395. Plenitude of power itself came with the investiture of 1396. Giangaleazzo's successor, Giovanni Maria (1402–12) was denied imperial recognition; Filippo Maria Visconti (1412–47) had to wait until 1426. The Ambrosian Republic of 1447–1450 was similarly based on the investitures of 1395 and 1396. Faced with Emperor Frederick III's determination not to recognize his claims, Francesco (1450–66), Galeazzo Maria (1466–76) and Giangaleazzo Sforza (1476–94) established their right to rule on the basis of popular election, meantime pleading with Emperor Frederick III for an investiture that would include plenitude of power and imperial prerogatives (iura reservata). The chapter concludes with an exploration of the investiture granted to Ludovico il Moro (1494–1500) by Maximilian I in 1494.

The Introduction explains the concept of absolute power or plenitude of power, as understood in the Middle Ages, when it meant a ruler's capacity to overrule laws and rights. The author describes how the prerogative was adopted by the Visconti and Sforza rulers of Milan. A brief historiographical survey follows, showing how the relationship between the powers of rulers and the rights of subjects has been explored in the work of Ugo Nicolini, Ennio Cortese, Dieter Wyduckel, Jesus Vallejo, and Kenneth Pennington. The sources used in the book are outlined, including legal commentaries and consilia. The author touches on the character and importance of consilia, explaining that they were considered by contemporary lawyers to be even more authoritative than academic commentaries. The other main sources are acts and decrees passed by the rulers of Milan. The Introduction concludes with an outline of the main chapters.

Chapter seven concerns the decline of absolute power as a tool of government. The lawyer and Senator and Egidio Bossi, insisted that absolute power was no longer misused in the duchy. Francesco Sforza II (1521‐1535) appears to have given up plenitude of power, handing it over to the Milanese Senate in the interests of justice. Whether or not the Senate did have plenitude of power was much debated. With its right to administer equity, Senate did not have to keep to the letter of the law; the Senate also had the right to judge according to the facts alone (sola facti veritate inspecta), ignoring established legal procedure. Both these prerogatives were analogous to plenitude of power; on the other hand, the Senate never referred to plenitude of power in its decisions. The discussion continued for decades among later commentators.

The Sicilian revolt in January 1848 set in train a series of uprisings throughout Europe. Bologna was quickly involved and, as inevitably happens at such times, matters quickly got out of hand. Hot-headed republicans, fellow-travelers, and marauding soldiery, some of it Sicilian in origin, were suspicious of “rich reactionaries,” among whose number Gioachino Rossini was unhappily counted. He had, in fact, signed a liberal, pro-nationalist petition to Cardinal Riario Sforza and made some modest contributions towards nationalist funds; but it was no secret that he was disturbed by much of the political violence, in particular by a series of arbitrary and uninvestigated assassinations which had taken place in Bologna. After a disturbance outside his house, he deposited his will with a local notary before beating a hasty retreat to Florence. His departure caused consternation in Bologna.

This chapter discusses a peace treaty between the King of France, Charles VIII, and the Duke of Milan, following the king's attempt to claim dynastic rights over the Kingdom of Naples. Charles had passed into Italy in 1494, during which time the inability of the Italian states to coordinate their moves paved the way to an effortless campaign. The very ease with which the enterprise had been accomplished, however, induced the Italian states to take action. A large coalition was thus created in early 1495 to counter the French, and a few months later, Charles would engage in negotiations with the enemy coalition, especially the Duke of Milan. A truce was signed, which allowed for the evacuation of the French, and the Duke submitted a proposal for what amounted to a separate peace with the King of France, which is the subject of this chapter's debate.

This chapter showcases a debate on whether or not the Venetians should make an agreement with Charles. At the time there was a possibility that Charles could find a pretext to seize the Duchy of Milan, in which case the Venetian Republic would have found itself squeezed in between Habsburg and imperial dominions on all sides. In addition, the French eclipse from Italian affairs meant the disappearance of the only credible counterweight to Charles's power. At the same time, the Venetians could not challenge the Emperor on their own. The year was thus spent in negotiations with Charles, on the one hand, and with all those who had reason to oppose his triumph, on the other — especially Pope Clement VII and the French regency.

Machiavelli begins by setting out some of the concrete methods he associates with acquiring by fortune – especially money and the personal ‘grace’ of others. He then discusses the very great disadvantages of relying on fortune rather than one’s own virtú. Princes who acquire by fortune should therefore try to switch to wholly virtuous modes and self-reliance. Francesco Sforza succeeded in doing this; Cesare Borgia tried, yet failed to maintain his state. Was his failure due to extraordinary bad fortune, as Machiavelli openly declares – or to some deficiency in his actions, as his detailed narrative implies? This chapter identifies many ironic elements in Machiavelli’s account of Borgia’s violent treatment of suspect allies, his murder of Remirro da Orco, his difficulties in holding the Romagna, and his continued dependence on the papacy after his father Pope Alexander VI’s death.

This chapter presents translations of the following documents: Exodus, Sermon III: Quinquagesima Sunday (25 February 1498); Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary (27 February 1498); Piero Parenti, Storia fiorentina; Iacopo Nardi, Istorie della città di Firenze; letter from Paolo de Somenzi to Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (27 February 1498); and La vita del Beato Ieronimo Savonarola.

Dual Inheritance Theory is traced starting from the application of mathematical models drawn from the field of population biology to the charting of competing cultural ideas over time pioneered by Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman. The contributions of a number of subsequent thinkers to the development of contemporary dual inheritance theory are presented. These include Richard Dawkins and the concept of memes; Donald Campbell and the idea of selection at the level of social systems; E.O. Wilson’s move from sociobiology to group selection; D.S. Wilson and his conception of society as an “organism”; William Durham’s coevolutionary theory; and the Dual Inheritance Theory of Richerson and Boyd. These theorists depart sufficiently from reductionisticneo-Darwinism to make a rapprochement with socio-cultural anthropology possible.

This chapter presents translations of the following documents: Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary (16–29 February 1496); letter from Paolo de Somenzi to Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (16 February 1496); and La vita del Beato Ieronimo Savonarola, previously attributed to Fra Pacifico Burlamacchi, Chapter XXXVIII, Concerning the conversion of the Florentine children and their fruits and works.

This chapter deals with Cavalli-Sforza’s early work in the development of statistical and computer techniques to create human population trees on the basis of the genetics of blood groups. The history within was now conceived to reside in the gene. At the same time, also Cavalli-Sforza synthesized knowledge from other fields such as archaeology, linguistics, and history with the genetic data to arrive at encompassing pictures of modern human population migrations. This also generated controversy, especially with exponents of cultural anthropology. Cavalli-Sforza’s team at Stanford University was a center of human population genetic research and pioneered the development of DNA analysis for the establishment of genetic kinship trees. mtDNA and Y-chromosomal markers became the most important objects for the reconstruction of modern human evolution. On the basis of that knowledge and the out-of-Africa hypothesis, diverse branches of the human origins sciences became integrated and the new view of human evolution was popularized.

This chapter engages with Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman’s theory of cultural evolution and Cavalli-Sforza’s understanding of progress. The tools from mathematical population genetics were adapted to capture cultural transmission – a dual inheritance theory that was controversial. The chapter views Cavalli-Sforza’s popularization of science in the light of his own theory of cultural transmission, especially his attempt to deconstruct particular notions of race. Like Huxley, Cavalli-Sforza believed in progress by means of cumulative science and the enlightenment of people through the knowledge thus created. And also in this view, progress would mainly be achieved through interference with culture rather than biology. It meant a net increase of happiness in meritocratic democracies.

The Human Genome Diversity Project was closely related to Cavalli-Sforza’d earlier research, especially as it was presented in History and Geography of Human Genes (1994). Not only the interest in reconstructing the modern human history, but also the blood collecting effort date further back. The HGDP was to expand that effort into a concerted global endeavour. In the project, the gene pools of indigenous peoples – the people who were to be sampled – were conceptualized as a panhuman heritage along the lines of notions of cultural heritage. Like his science before, the HGDP met with criticism from other disciplines and now also from indigenous groups. The chapter shows how the legacy of the HGDP is clearly visible in what is seen as its successor: The Genographic Project, with which Cavalli-Sforza, too, was associated. It in particular profited from the coming of age of the Y-chromosome as a population genetic system. It is shown that the Genographic Project was driven by a similar rhetoric of human advancement as Cavalli-Sforza used.

Continuing the developments of the preceding chapters, this one engages with the novel constellations of science, markets and identity politics. The role of databanks and the internet is discussed for the global nature of these networks. However, symbolized by the term genographic network, it is shown that in the case of human population genetics, these networks are glocalized structures. The Genographic Project has a commercial branch that sells direct-to-customer genetic ancestry tests. Through this genetic-ancestry tracing branch, it is connected to other companies in the US and Switzerland. All of these make profit from the novel genetic technologies and the mtDNA and Y-chromosomal systems. But they also offer tests that are customized to their particular clientele: American Jews, African Americans, and Europeans respectively. It is shown how for human population genetic data to be meaningful for customers, it has to travel with images and narratives. Such sense-generating narratives are popularized in books and films, and they raise issues of similarity and difference, of ‘tribal, ethnic, racial, etc. affiliation’.

Throughout the book, there is a strong emphasis on practices of narration and visualization as necessary conditions for circulating the knowledge about history within. In this final chapter of Part III, visualization and exhibition once again take center stage. Also a topic that runs through Part III, it closely engages with the tree structure as a way to visualize the phylogeny of human populations. It problematizes this way of visualization as presenting the evolution of human populations as independent histories. The tension between human unity and diversity is shown to be fundamental to human population genetics. These points are highlighted through the analysis of a traveling exhibition that Cavalli-Sforza curated: ‘Homo Sapiens: The Great History of Human Diversity’. The exhibition is a culmination of Cavalli-Sforza’s work. On these premises, the exhibition and visitors’ reactions allow to make general points about genetic history and the ways in which it impacts understandings of ‘self and other’.

The conclusion of the book situates the endeavors of Osborn, Huxley, and Cavalli-Sforza in reconstructing and circulating the integrated histories based on bones, organisms, and molecules, in humanist thought. They present one great history of humankind, based on belief in the unity, progressive nature, and enlightening effect of science. This view is problematized present in the efforts of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. In this understanding, evolutionary biology is the Leitwissenschaft that should inform worldview and guide ideas about the future of humankind. In this context, attempts by scholars in the humanities to base their knowledge on scientific insights are discussed. In all of these fields, there is a reconfiguration of ‘nature and culture’ at work that should remain a focus of scholarly attention, encompassing processes of naturalization, de-naturalization, and re-naturalization with regard to human identities. Such processes are marked by growing automatization and technologization that – together with the biological epistemic objects – create an aura of authority and objectivity. Population geneticists today can analyze entire genomes and group people according to computer programs. They can visualize genetic kinship in different ways – as tree or as mosaic. What might the future of history within look like in view of this development and other branches such as epigenetics?.

This chapter surveys translations of comedy in the 1550–1660 period. Thomas Randolph, for instance, turned Aristophanes' Plutus into a full-scale English play, the sole thoroughgoing attempt in the period to recast one of Aristophanes' comedies for the contemporary stage. Translated Roman comedies include Vulgaria Quaedam ex Terencio and Floures for Latine spekynge. Scripted Italian comedy has an intermittent presence in translation or fairly close adaptation throughout the period. About half the instances are in Latin, most if not all of them for performance at Cambridge. These include Abraham Fraunce's Victoria (c.1582; Luigi Pasqualigo's Il Fedele), Walter Hawkesworth's Leander (1599; Sforza 'Oddi's Erofi lomachia) and Labyrinthus (1603; Giambattista della Porta's La Cintia).