"In the years between 1280 and 1400, Florence was the site of important experiments in communal republican government. Most studies of medieval and Renaissance Florence have ignored or only partially understood the role of the guilds as political corporations in the evolution of the ideas and institutions that were central to its republican experience. John Najemy's book, based on extensive new archival material, offers an original interpretation of Florentine politics in these 120 years, from the first attempt to institute a guild-based republic at the end of the thirteenth century to the advent of the consensus politics of civic humanism in the generation around 1400." -- Book jacket.