Chapter Nine
Society, Elite Families, and Politics in Late Medieval Italian Cities
Late medieval social history has been among the most fruitful areas of research since the Second World War. This has been especially true for Italian towns and cities between 1200 and 1500. Their histories have provided models for study for much of the urban landscape of the rest of Europe. Given the scope and aims of this collection of essays and the vast bibliography produced for the topic of this essay, it is appropriate to limit this essay to Italian towns and cities during that period in comparative terms. Urban elites across Europe are comparable in the ways that they used mercantile interests and rural bases of power to maintain dominance. The historiography of Italian urban society, especially that of elites, reflects the major scholarly trends since the mid-twentieth century and can indicate where future research might head, not only for Italy but also for urban elites more generally.1
Town life on the Italian peninsula took off after 1200. While there had been some continuation of urban concentrations from the fifth century, cities really grew in terms of population and cultural significance in the thirteenth century. By then they were more or less freed of imperial capacity and were well into developing the economic activities and capacities that gave them the wealth that placed them at the center of the European economy. Pierre Racine quotes the work of four major scholars on the booming cities throughout the peninsula. The success of these towns was based on revolutions in politics, the production and preservation of documents along with the requisite literacy, the conduct of commerce and banking, and the appearance of the new mendicant orders that aimed to provide the pastoral care of those in the city, promote papal authority, and ensure religious conformity.2 Of primary significance for this chapter was the emergence of urban regimes in which the evolution of political institutions created a documentary bonanza. Further wealth became concentrated in the hands of the elite families that formed the oligarchic cores of the communes.3
During the course of the thirteenth century, merchant families grew very rich from a “commercial revolution” in institutional innovations, and the elaboration of credit instruments and accounting practices. Although it is still not clear how they initially accumulated capital, many of these families either drew upon the resources of their rural estates and moved to the city or developed their urban proprieties, and then invested in banking (especially lucrative papal banking), and moved representatives and capital round Europe to take advantage of developing markets.4 Other members of the elite were not so venturesome but still managed to thrive in the new urban environments. Suffice it to say that the Italian peninsula during the thirteenth century became the economic dynamo of the European economy and among the most wealthy and sophisticated economies before the industrial revolutions after 1800.
Economic success and political sophistication were based on the keeping of careful records and enough literacy to take advantage of them. This sea of archival and manuscript survivals is of fundamental importance. As Trevor Dean asserts, the quality and quantity of this written material are far beyond those of the rest of Europe. Quoting John Larner, Dean goes on to say: “More source materials survive than a hundred scholars could adequately master.”5 After Italian unification in 1870, scholars who were then able to exploit the opening of state archives produced a veritable ocean of publications on the cities of Italy. This also fostered a growth in interest in local history. From the time of Jacob Burckhardt in the last half of the nineteenth century, foreign researchers and writers further enriched our understandings of these innovation communes and lordships, going far beyond trying to discover the elusive origins of the “Renaissance.”6
Written sources for society, families, and politics include notarial documents in the tens of thousands, the proceedings of communal councils, collections of statutes, fiscal evaluations and records, diplomatic correspondence, familial letters, contemporary chronicles and histories, and theoretical studies of political ideas, judicial records, and account books and merchant correspondence. These sources are further enriched by the writings of clerics involved in pastoral care, sermonizing, and promoting devotion to new urban saints. From the twelfth century the survival of secular material was promoted by the revival and modernization of the procedures and ideas of Roman Law. The recording of the notariate was further fostered by the recognition of the value of written records by both public institutions and private individuals. This was helped by the recognition of the memorial value of records of actual transactions with their details as offering legal proof. Notarial practice offered possibilities for noting how things had been done in the past and for devising innovative contracts for using the law and institutions for specific and new needs and ends.7
From the thirteenth century, writers in a more secular vein such as Brunetto Latini, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, and many others produced literary masterpieces that can also be used to understand the culture and society of Italy between 1250 and 1450. Lauro Martines has pointed out how less famous writers such as Gentile Sermini and Piero Veneziano can be read intelligently to illustrate traits, social concepts, and issues in order to enlighten the reader on community and familial ideas about demography, gender, age, sexuality, and daily life.8
Another kind of source that is of fundamental importance for our understanding of these societies, families, and politics is called ricordanze or family memoires/diaries. They are almost unique to Florence, and little exists resembling them for the rest of Europe.9
Historians of art and architecture have also turned their attention to subjects of social and political interest in studies of the portrayal of children, women, marriage, and the Blessed Virgin among numerous other subjects. The “Good Government” frescos in the town hall of Siena have spawned a large literature on how they represent a good and well-governed society.10 Historians of architecture have studied palaces and other kinds of domestic and private space. Archeological studies of urban remains for this late period are relatively rare because of the problem that the sites, essentially peoples’ basements or cellars, are presently occupied. Archaelogy has been more productive for rural sites and strongholds occupied by these elites. Further publication of these findings would be beneficial.
The richness of these sources has facilitated some of the best historical studies on society, the family, and politics anywhere in Europe between 1200 and 1500, including in-depth studies of a wide variety of urban topics. They can provide a comparative perspective for similar studies for the rest of Europe.
Writings about families in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance period, from family chronicles themselves to histories of Italian republics and towns under the lordship of a particular family, have been around for a long time.11 Early modern antiquarians compiled detailed studies, often commissioned, of families, especially royal ones, well into the twentieth century. Their work has often proved very useful because of their collective biographical approach. In the early 1960s Phillipe Ariès laid the foundation for more contemporary work on the family, or at least the treatment of children within it, with the publication of L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, soon translated as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. This was followed by studies of later periods.12 Ariès did show that familial institutions, ideas, and practices have a history. He also encouraged interest in familial mentalities and emotions in the past.
In a recent article in the American Historical Review Nara Milanich has called for a new paradigm for the study of the family in the past.13 She also points out how the history of the family has been used for modern political and mythical agendas, and not just in Latin America. Milanich rightly asserts that the family is the basis for much of everything regarding the state, sexuality, domestic arrangements, and childrearing. However, its study has fallen into a “quiet senescence.” She goes on to point out the value of discriminating between the family life and dominant cultures of the elite and those of other classes. This includes difference in family size, whether nuclear or extended, and the extent to which they were affective or patriarchic. Her point about cultures of inequality should not be underestimated for the Middle Ages. Her work and that of others such as Jack Goody could be brought into more comparative use by historians of the Middle Ages.14 Goody’s other publications comparing European social practices with those of the East are intended to offer an additional comparative view of the family, kinship, and capitalism outside Europe.15 There can be little doubt that we need a new paradigm for the study of the pre-modern family, and its comparison with cultures that are more modern could lead to a better understanding of the functioning of kinship and the foundations of capitalistic ideas and practices. Katherine Lynch has recently encouraged this comparative approach in her book on families and their other relationships with urban institutions. The family might be called the foundation of human society, and it functions in a wider and extra-familial community.16
Among the richest sources of material about the family at nearly all levels of society for late medieval Italy is the great catasto or tax evaluation for the city of Florence and its Tuscan subjects or region. Cadastral surveys were common enough in the fourteenth century, but the one carried out in 1427 for the Florentine state is one of the most detailed and exhaustive survey or fiscal census of population ever done in the pre-industrial age. It found some 60,000 households and counted more than 260,000 people. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber used this great monument of medieval counting to produce one of the most important, thorough, and pioneering studies on any place in the later Middle Ages.17 They found that there were two types of domestic systems functioning at this low point in population level, patrician and artisanal or peasant. Their findings on patrician households are fundamental.18 They demonstrate a context for the distribution of wealth in the city state of Florence. They show kinds of wealth, marital statuses, relationships within a household with respect to its head, age distributions within a synchronic population, and wealth in the city and outside of it. By this time Florence had become the economic capital of it city state. They go on to describe marriage patterns involving usually considerably older men and younger women. They integrate these practices with the fates of children, the implications of life cycles, patterns of birth and death, gender distributions, and the effects of wealth on determining household size and structure.
Their major findings for elites included a dramatic account of the distribution of wealth. In 1427 Florence included 14 percent of the lay population of its part of Tuscany (essentially all but the region controlled by Siena), but held two-thirds of the wealth. According to Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber: “Florence was thus a blazing sun of affluence, surrounded by dim planets of wealth in the smaller Tuscan cities – all of them set in a dark, nearly desolate rural space.”19
Within Florence the top 100 families or 1 percent of urban households held a quarter of the city’s wealth, roughly a sixth of the wealth of the entire Florentine State. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber also found that the Tuscan marriage model differed from the European one described by Hajnal. Contrary to the pattern suggested by him, the principal characteristics of Tuscan marriages in 1427, as described by them, were “a young age at first marriage for women (16), with almost no permanent spinsters in the community, outside the convents; an advanced age at first marriage for men, with a significant number of permanent bachelors.”20 The consequence of this was a large gap in age between husband and wife. This was most extreme among Florentine elites: the wealthiest men married first at an average age of 31. This helped produce a large pool of unmarried young men. Other results were dowry inflation, as families of young girls competed for desirable and appropriate husbands. There was also a large proportion of widows, as younger wives outlived their husbands.
The authors did not hesitate to extend some of their findings into observations about the wider culture and economy of this Tuscan state, including the proletarization of populations and their debt servitude to urban elites. The book also graphically demonstrated the long-term baleful effects of the numerous visitations of the plague over the second half of the fourteenth century. Though now thirty years old, this work is still the starting point for late medieval social and demographic history. It also laid the groundwork for later work on the social world of elites in Florence and a comparison with other cities.
The rest of this chapter will concentrate first on the social world of the oligarchs and nobles who ran these cities. From among the wealth of scholarly works on these themes, we can employ work on specific families, marriage markets dominated by dowry inflation, the effects of plagues and demographic trends, and succession practices. The chapter will then conclude with a section on the social and political dynamics of the cities in which these families lived, their exercise of power, and the negotiated reciprocal possibilities of factionalism as a stable profitable way of politics.
In addition to the catasto records, the archives and libraries of the city of Florence contain many other records of family and political life. These include thousands of notarial documents, private materials from prominent lineages, and the records of the dowry investment fund from over the course of the fifteenth century. Two examples of studies based on the accounts books and correspondence of elite families are the books by Richard A. Goldthwaite and F. William Kent.21 Though they complement one another in many ways, they reach quite different conclusions on whether these lineages were losing wider family solidarity and falling more and more into nuclear units. Goldthwaite followed Ariès’s ideas about the progressive nuclearization or fragmentation of these families. To him economic forces encouraged less cohesiveness in terms of fewer joint business projects, and more individual private residential properties instead of shared ownerships. He based much of his findings on account books, which do indicate such a fall in mutual activities and interests. Kent worked on a different set of families with different sources. Reading diaries and private papers, he found a continued survival of extended households and a stress on kinship ties, especially in political and social matters. His families and lineages jointly hold few corporate properties other than the old family palaces or towers within Florence, chapels, and patronage rights. Kent also demonstrated the importance of neighborhood ties and vertical patronage links through society. Both scholars indicated how the individual members of these families had ties to other institutions within the city, such as confraternities, guilds, and political factions built around other families.
There are now many studies of individual elite families from Florence, other Italian towns and regions, and elsewhere.22 Scholars have studied a wide variety of particular aspects of families and oligarchs; an example is the collection edited by Ciappelli and Rubin on memory, kinship, art, and neighborhood.23 There is clearly a rich and enticing future for such studies in Florence and elsewhere. There is need for more work outside of the dominant Florentine, and, to a lesser extent, Venetian paradigms. For example, there needs to be more research on the families who became tyrants themselves and their allied oligarchic lineages in places such as Milan or Padua.
One inhibiting obstacle has been the sources. There are few if any ricordanze outside Florence, and even basic familial account books are rare.24 To study the histories of elite families in another republic such as Siena, one has to reconstruct information about familial activity and interests from notarial chartularies. These can be supplemented by the vast collections of individual parchments written by notaries before 1400. From the mid-fourteenth century, these parchments gradually become rarer, as their participants grew more and more reliant on the records kept by the notary in his own chartulary. When deprived of the contextual information provided by ricordanze or diaries, historians have to reconstruct objectives and interests out of more reticent documents than those available to Professors Goldthwaite and Kent. Large numbers of letters between the commune and its leading citizens do survive in Siena, for example, but they are rarely very personal or enlightening about matters internal to the lineages involved. Some towns, such as Bologna and Lucca, do have rich judicial sources, but they have not been mined for elite activities. Though not blessed with many judicial records, the archives of Siena do contain a wealth of material on the economic activities, political machinations, marriage strategies, religious interests, and patronage connections of its leading families. This is likely to be the case elsewhere in the period between 1300 and 1500.
Another area of study on elite families has been patterns of marriage alliances and strategies, accompanied by research on dowry inflation and ideas about relationships. Anthony Molho published a major study on how propertied families, mostly of considerable substance, maintained their power and affluence within the context of economic and regime changes and the terrible revisits of the plague after 1350 and into the fifteenth century. Molho integrated the surviving letters, memoir books, and abundant fiscal records to enrich Julius Kirshner’s and his systematic analysis of the Monte delle doti (Dowry Fund). This work contains bits of information on about 19,000 marriages, beginning in 1425. These record the investments by fathers in a fund that would pay them interest and would eventually allow them to withdraw the deposits increased by interest when their daughters married. Molho argued that individuals subordinated their personal desires to a deeper concern for their families. The fund encouraged patterns of endogamy among the Florentine aristocracy. According to Molho’s analysis of the catasto or tax evaluation from 1480, the Florentine elite comprised about 500 rich individuals. This group belonged in his view to 417 lineages, at the core of which was an inner elite of 110 people. He also defines an additional three status groups. With such definitions, he suggests patterns of endogamy and lateral alliances of marriages within the circle of his elite. Molho’s book contains a wealth of information on a large list of families, but rarely goes beyond repeating the detailed studies by others on certain lineages, such as that of the Alberti. The individuals and their choices get lost in the details of financial transactions. Research on the marriage patterns of particular lineages within elites could nuance his perceived patterns of individual choice sacrificed to the influence of lineage objectives and interests.
The legal aspects of these systems of marriage, dowries, exile, emancipation by fathers, illegitimacy, and succession have been illuminated by Julius Kirshner and Thomas Kuehn in many studies in the decades since 1980.25 They have paid special attention to both legal theory and judicial practice to show how the legal system limited peoples’ intentions but also created opportunities to craft innovative and desired solutions to problematic legal objectives. Anyone studying families in Italy or the legal systems of the north needs to take into consideration what options were open to people and how they manipulated these options often toward more satisfying and creative ends. It must also be remembered that the ethical aspects of marriage and succession were shaped by and within canon law and ecclesiastical courts.26 Legal sources such as consilia, opinions written by scholars on particular juridical problems, do offer much promise in our understanding of these systems of law. However, the great majority is either unpublished or exists in sometimes questionable editions produced in the sixteenth century. They are not readily accessible but can be found throughout the local libraries of Italy. It must also be remembered that, although consilia seem to discuss real people in real legal difficulties, this may not be the case. They often treat theoretical problems that might be useful and instructive for the real world. Still the content of their arguments and the discussion of solutions can be useful when studying the options and possibilities of individuals, families, and lineages in the legal system.
Other scholars have studied dowry systems in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Venice provided another rich opportunity to study marriage as an evocative social act with political objectives and consequences. Stanley Chojnacki’s numerous studies of the patrician class in Venice do provide a contrast with upper-class families in Florence, especially with regard to the roles and opportunities of women. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber portrayed the women of Florence as rather hapless victims and pawns, like the literary images of “Griseldas” with little choice in such matters and few rights over marital property by the fourteenth century.27 Chojnacki, on the other hand, found a much better situation, at least for elite women, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Venice. Women there could seemingly manipulate the system to their advantage. Dowry inflation was supposed to be controlled, with the intention to level the playing field for the city’s oligarchs and the legally defined noble class. According to Chojnacki, women exercised more power in Venice because of the value of their dowries to their husbands, their greater freedom in testamentary bequests, the political rewards to their husbands if they worked with the families tied to them through their wives and other female connections, and just plain affection that could occur between husbands and wives.28
Work on patrician families elsewhere in Italy and the rest of Europe might confirm either of these views on the status of elite women within oligarchic and patriarchic lineages. We need research reconstructing the actual transmission of wealth between the parties contracting the marriages at the moment of agreements and clarifying when the contents of dowries were physically passed between them in fulfillment of contracts. This is needed to understand fully how these systems worked for individuals and lineages. This requires the tracking of particular properties and bits of wealth over time within the context of the life cycles of male and female lineage members. This would also entail the systematic study of wills and last testaments. In order to understand a will, one should know as much as possible about the person writing it and the familial and legal options open to him or her.
The early fourteenth century brought the beginning of many crises that affected the populations of Italy and Northern Europe. Both areas suffered extensive famines between 1317 and 1329.29 The chronicles and records of the Italian cities describe these in considerable detail. The upper classes there and in the north were accused of hoarding and manipulating the food supply. In the ensuing bread riots, the houses and storage places of the elites were among the first spaces to be attacked by the starving rioters. The governments of the town responded by trying to regulate the supply of food, banishing useless mouths, and to prevent forestalling the market by various mechanisms. They had only limited success. While we are unsure of the mortality rates, they were undoubtedly considerable. There might also have been some effect on the longer-term physical health of many in the surviving population, though this remains unclear in medical thought or in the historical record. There can be little doubt that the elites in Italian cities did try to benefit from the reoccurring crises. With their extensive agricultural holdings in the countryside and influence on the road systems surrounding the urban areas, they were in a perfect position to carry out just such manipulations of supply.
Populations seem to have peaked in the first decade of the fourteenth century, generally reaching numbers not attained again until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was into this evolving Malthusian crisis that the Black Death arrived in 1347. There is presently a dispute on whether these fourteenth-century plagues were really the same disease as the modern bubonic plague first described in the 1890s by Alexander Yersin, who studied occurrences in China and India and later in North America. Scholars such as Samuel Cohn and Graham Twigg have raised real doubts about this diagnosis of the fourteenth-century disease and suggested other diseases such as earlier versions of the flu virus or anthrax.30 There can be little doubt, however, that it killed 30–40 percent of the population in its first visitation between 1347 and 1349. It must be remembered that it recurred regularly and with great severity for the next 150 years and beyond. The upper-class members of the towns in Italy and elsewhere did not escape a considerable mortality, though there is a need for study on its effects on the numbers of family members, clients, and henchmen making up the big rich lineages. Did they really flee to their rural estates, like the group at the core of Boccaccio’s Decameron? Did local politics change because of demographic changes? Did certain grand lineages suffer more than others, thus changing whatever balances of power that might have existed? Did the balance of economic and political resources change?
Recent scholarship on the politics of Italian cities between 1200 and 1500 has focused with various degrees of intensity on several aspects of elite culture. These include the changing roles of those lineages labeled magnates, factional conflict, social and political clientage, architectural and artistic patronage, the relationship of lords with the other major families in their subject cities, the use of space in urban environments and neighborhoods, lordship in rural areas around cities, concepts of nobility, women’s roles in linking together lineages, mercantile and landed wealth, and domestic life. This chapter will end with a discussion of the question of magnates, the powers involved in rural lordships, and the use of urban space and image for political and social prestige.
In the early to mid-thirteenth century, the inhabitants of many towns of northern Italy came to be governed by communal forms of government. Their leading citizens swore oaths to protect their towns, though most people had little say in the matter. They were run by small oligarchies made up of members from a commercial and feudal elite.31 Even at the core of these governing groups there was an inner circle that came to exercise real power. Often with overlapping sources of wealth and power, some groups were merchants and some had rural and urban landed interests.32 Some had various levels of interest and ability in military affairs or violence.33 Some were essentially new in terms of their wealth and prestige; and some were related to the old rural feudal nobility.34 Lack of sources and surnames hampers a deeper understanding of who these men were. They did consider the new commune to be theirs and barely distinguishable from their personal holdings.
This was to be a continuing aspect of all elite relationships to government down to the present day. Under the influence of the twentieth-century sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Achile Loria, and Gaetano Mosca, the scholars who studied them were frequently part of the elite themselves or were playing to gain its favor. Under the influence of a more materialist historical view, others from the nineteenth century and on were much opposed to upper-class dominance and posited a struggle between classes. In the late thirteenth century, some members of the city of Florence sought to limit the power of some of their overbearing fellows. In the 1280s and 1290s, following precedents from Bologna and Siena, they passed laws restricting a group they called magnates, making them ineligible for some communal offices and subject to harsh penalties for any recourse to violence on their social inferiors. Well into the fourteenth century, families were added to the list of magnates, while others managed to get themselves removed from such restrictions. Those labeled magnates were a slice of the oligarchy in most of these cities. Florence has provided the paradigm for the study of these members of elite and oligarchic ruling classes. This is in part due to its exaggerated general influence on historical studies of late medieval Italy but also because of it rich sources and the persuasive qualities of the historians who have studied the city on the Arno, such as Gaetano Salvemini and the anti-Marxist Nicola Ottokar.35 Magnate tyranny and violence over other classes probably did extend to the countryside. At the same time, the commune also exploited the rural population in a variety of fiscal ways. Though the magnates were excluded from the highest offices in a commune such as Siena, their friends, clients, and business partners did have their hands on the levers of power. On the other hand, the magnates who did not have seats in the towns or many links with their more mercantile brethren probably did suffer more serious problems because they became marginal to the real power elite. At the same time, there were magnates with different capacities. Their history varies from place to place, demonstrating that, while Florentine history can provide a starting point for analysis for other urban concentrations in Italy or elsewhere, it is better not to assume that there is always a similar pattern everywhere. In Florence certain magnate families did what they could do lose their magnate label, while at the same time economic and demographic factors worked to break down their ties to a lineage.36 Some were allowed to change their names legally. By the late fourteenth century in Florence they were marginalized or absorbed in factions jockeying for positions of power in the city. In Siena in the same era, certain great magnate houses rose up in rebellion to seize control of the city, as so many of their contemporaries had already done in other cities of northern Italy. Their rival lineages would band together even with deadly enemy families and factions to oppose the control of one of the great families such as the Salimbeni or Tolomei. In the end absorption was not peaceful, as it seems to have been in Florence. One probable difference was that the Sienese families had maintained rural strongholds and wealth that were further strengthened by private armies and gangs of henchmen ready to do their bidding. Much more work needs to be done on the reality of their rural lordships, sources of manpower, the terms of their relationships with that of manpower, patterns of rural strongholds and wealth, and geography of their systems of clientage within the cities themselves. Philip Jones’s idea about the interconnection between rural and feudal elites and the commercial ones in the towns can be found in these magnates.37
These lineages were at the core of the various factions contending for control of a town, a struggle for offices, and thus power of policies and fiscal matters. Dale Kent has studied Florence in the era of initial dominance by the Medici family. According to Kent, the Medici succeeded because of their roles as personal patrons and party leaders. They outshone rival lineages and factions in these matters and came to control the committees of government.38 Though few places have the documents that Kent uses to show how the Medici did it, patronage and clientage were at the core of the politics of all medieval towns. Many existed in a sort of unstable equilibrium, as a few ambitious families jockeyed for dominance. Venice did have laws and traditions that helped keep the city serene. In Siena, particular families tried their hands on several occasions in the late fourteenth century. They failed because the commune was able to muster support of the other great lineages afraid of another clan’s dominance. Eventually the contending old lineages were defeated in battle or wounded so badly in the factional battles that they gave up. The systems of patronage underlying these conflicts need more study, both in the city and outside it, to get all links that sometimes look like a sort of “bastard feudalism” involving private armies of professionals or press-ganged peasants.
Part of the influence of elites was their control over space in towns and the impressive buildings they erected for their lineages from the mid-thirteenth century.39 Their compounds came to be almost villages within the city walls. In Siena, for example, elite families often had their own somewhat fortified piazza (a castellare) in which they built a fortress with a tower, apartments, a church, and rows of shops or storerooms. The main palace was divided into shares passed on for generations. Maintenance was joint. Patronage of their church was controlled. They even rotated the use of the most elaborate residence within the lineage. Succession to the most strategic rural and urban strongholds was carefully passed to male members of the family. Over the course of the fourteenth century, these common properties came to be divided into shares too small to be significant or were bought up by the more successful lines within the lineage. Property-holding patterns by elites need more detailed research, if we are going to have a better understanding of the history of these families and lineages. Control of streets and neighborhoods, prominent participation in rituals, and the construction of prestige familial monuments in churches were also part of this game, theater, and display of power.40 Again the scholarship has been fullest on Florence and Venice, but much can be done elsewhere.
Notes
1 See the Bibliography for useful articles that offer suggestive comparative perspectives, such as: Britnell, “England and Northern Italy” and “The Towns of England and Northern Italy”; Jones et al., “The Later Medieval English Urban Household”; Kowaleski, “The History of Urban Families in Medieval England”; also Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy and The Marriage Exchange. Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work) has described Italian civil society in the Middle Ages without taking fully into consideration the role of elites in manipulating society and social capital for their own best interests.
2 Racine, Les Villes d’Italie, p. 1, quoting Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, Robert S. Lopez, and Giulia Barone. Racine goes on to organize his textbook according to these themes.
3 The so-called mendicant revolution certainly did affect changes in the practices of religion in these cities and among their elites. This was especially true in terms of ideas about usury and gaining salvation; for wills, see Cohn, Death and Property in Siena and The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death. Those topics would require at the very least another essay.
4 The classic discussion of the “commercial revolution” remains that of Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, and Jones, Italian City-State, pp. 152–332; see also Masschaele, Chapter 5, this volume.
5 Dean, Towns of Italy, p. 1; he refers to Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante, p. 11, and further points to thoughts of Jones, Italian City-State, on pp. 156–7, 202–3.
6 The literature on the “Renaissance” and the urban cultures of the Italian cities is vast, but one interesting place to begin is Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients. Educational ideas and practices in terms of socialization for moral purposes for society have been a topic of controversy among scholars; see Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, and Black, Humanism and Education.
7 For recording keeping, notaries, and literacy in Italy, see the basic works of Cammarosano, Italia medievale; Langeli, Notai; Albini, Le scritture del commune; Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy; see also the fundamental article by Diane Owen Hughes on notarial documents as historical sources: “Toward Historical Ethnography”; for the “documentary revolution,” see Maire Vigueur, “Révolution documentaire et révolution scripturaire.” There is now an excellent manual for studying material in the vernacular in Italy: Redon et al., Les Langues de l’Italie médiévale; see also Britnell, Chapter 20, this volume.
8 Martines, Strong Words, and Martines and Baca, eds, An Italian Renaissance Sextet.
9 Jones, “Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries,” and Grubb, Family Memoirs from Verona and Vicenza.
10 Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art,” Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo Frescoes,” and Frugoni, A Distant City, among numerous others.
11 See, as an example for an English noble family, Given-Wilson, “Chronicles of the Mortimer Family.”
12 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, and Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family; they displayed little understanding of the family or childhood in the Middle Ages. The initial efforts at psychohistory showed even more misunderstanding of medieval attitudes especially in terms of parental attachment: deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood.” These studies did follow the traditional idea of the Middle Ages as a brutal time. This is not to say that there was not plenty of child abuse and neglect in the period, but only to point out that it is exaggerated by these authors, who were concerned primarily in finding the origins of the modern family, especially the nuclear one. Margaret L. King and Albrecht Classen have produced fine bibliographical references and useful recent studies of the state of the question for historical study of childhood: King “Concepts of Childhood,” and Classen, “Phillip Ariés and the Consequences,” in Classen, Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pp. 1–65. See also the classic study Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, and Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” and, for a comparison to the experience of children in Italy, see her Growing up in Medieval London.
13 Milanich, “Whither Family History?”
14 The family and it structures have long been of interest to anthropologists; for an introduction to anthropological approaches to the family history, see Françoise Zonabend, “An Anthropological Perspective on Kinship and the Family,” in Burguière et al., eds, A History of the Family, vol. 1, pp. 8–68, 655–8, with a useful glossary of anthropological terminology on pp. 648–54. Jack Goody has written an important but controversial book about the regulation of the family by the Church: The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe; see the critical essays by Mitterauer, Saller, Sheehan, and Bonfield in Continuity and Change, 6/3 (Dec. 1991). Committed Catholic scholars, such as David Herlihy and Michael M. Sheehan, have strongly disagreed with Goody’s image of a church regulating family life to its own material benefit in terms of succession. This is an argument that needs more study.
15 Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive and The East in the West. The most interesting aspect of the recent study by Linda Mitchell (Family Life in the Middle Ages) is her inclusion of chapters on the family in Islam and Judaism.
16 Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe; she also points out the connections between urban and rural society, the different practices of plebeians and patricians, and the consistent importance of clientage and neighborhood.
17 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families, is an English translation and a much abridged version of Les Toscans et leur familles from 1978. Their research was computer assisted but in the “punch-card age,” when coding, gathering data, and the ensuing analysis were much more awkward and laborious than is the case now. That possible pieces of information on such matters as occupation, that are contained in this remarkable set of documents, were not gathered hardly detracts from its value and remarkable insights into a particular population. A searchable online version has lived on at www.stg.brown.edu/projects/catasto/ along with a database of office-holders in Florence between 1282 and 1532 at www.stg.brown.edu/projects/tratte/. One can also find information there on the code-books employed and Herlihy’s own work on naming practices.
18 Though much praised, the version in English of Herlihy and Klapisch’s work did not go without criticism: see Smith (then a prominent member of the Cambridge Population Group), “The People of Tuscany and their Families”; see also the comments by scholars in “Family in Medieval Tuscany: Critiques and a Reply,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11/3 (1981), 477–506; other reviews raising questions are J. N. Stephens in the English Historical Review, 103 (1988), pp. 110–12, and F. W. Kent in Speculum, 55 (1980), 129–31; for rural families and information on the Cambridge Population Group, see Schofield, Chapter 6, this volume.
19 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families, p. 97.
20 Ibid., p. 215; Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.”
21 Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, and Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence.
22 For Florence and its region, see Fabbri, Lansing, and Pirillo; for elsewhere in Italy, see Allegrezza, Carocci, Grubb, and Queller. For outside Italy, see the works by Nicholas, Rheubottom, McKee, Mertes, Jones, Kowaleski, and Thrupp in the Bibliography.
23 One example of the breadth of such work is collected in Ciapelli and Rubin, eds, Art, Memory, and Family, which is about the many connections among family, society, kin, neighborhood, art, and memory.
24 For there existence in other places, see Grubb, Family Memoirs from Verona and Vicenza.
25 Kirshner, Pursuing Honor while Avoiding Sin, and Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors, to name only two of their numerous publications involving the civil law and social institutions. For a comparative and Mediterranean perspective, see Sperling and Wray, eds, Across the Religious Divide.
26 See the work of Michael M. Sheehan in Farge, ed., Marriage, Family, and Law, and the recent monumental study Donahue, Law, Marriage, and Society. Such ecclesiastical court records have been assumed to have been pretty much nonexistent in Italy and outside England. However, this is proving not to be the case as scholars work in more ecclesiastical archives; see Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, for insight into ideas about marriage and class; Dean and Lowe, eds, Marriage in Italy; for a general study of marriage in the Middle Ages, see Howell, Chapter 7, this volume.
27 See, in particular: Klapisch-Zuber, “The Cruel Mother: Maternity, Widowhood, and Dowry in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” and “The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento” in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy; for similar ideas about the status of women in Florence see Cohn, Women in the Streets; see also the articles by Isabelle Chabot; for a general study of gender in the Middle Ages, see Arnold, Chapter 8, this volume.
28 Most of Chojnacki’s essays are collected in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice; see also Guzzetti, “Dowries in Fourteenth-Century Venice.” Queller and Madden raise interesting questions about dowries in Venice in “Father of the Bride”; for the relationship between elite women, fashion, and consumerism, see Stuard, Gilding the Market.
29 Jordan, The Great Famine.
30 Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, and Twigg, The Black Death.
31 Bertelli, Il potere oligarchico nell stato-cittá médiévale.
32 Bordone, Castelnuovo, and Varanini, Le aristocrazie dai signori rurali al patriziato.
33 Gasparri, I milites cittadini; Grillo, Cavalieri e popoli in armi; and Maire Vigueur, Cavalieri e cittadini.
34 Heers, Le Clan familial au Moyen Age and Parties and Political Life in the Medieval West.
35 Salvemini, Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295 (originally published in 1899), and Ottokar, Il comune di Firenze all fine del Dugento (originally published in 1926); see also the work of Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, Raveggi et al, Ghibellini, Guelfi e Popolo Grasso, and numerous others.
36 Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cite; see also her numerous articles leading up to this important book; Caduff, “Magnati e popolani nel contado fiorentino”; for magnates on a more general level, see Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, Pistoia, Magnati e popolani nell’Italia comunale; Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, Les Élites urbaines au Moyen Age; Clauzel, “Les Élites urbaines et le pouvoir municipal”; for elites and urban revolts, see Cohn’s two recent books: Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe and Lust for Liberty.
37 Jones, Economia e società nell’Italia médiévale.
38 Kent, The Rise of the Medici.
39 For Italy among many recent studies, see Friedman, “Places and the Street in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Italy,” and, for Florence, see Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence; for a comparative perspectives on space in towns in the north, see Arnade, Howell, and Simons, “Fertile Spaces,” and Boone, “Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders.
40 Crum and Paoletti, Renaissance Florence.
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De Clerq, Wim, Dumolyn, Jan, and Haemers, Jelle, “Vivre noblement: Material Culture and Elite Identity in Late Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 38/1 (Summer 2007), pp. 1–31.
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Fleming, Peter, Family and Household in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
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Howell, Martha C., The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Jones, Sarah Rees, et al., “The Later Medieval English Urban Household,” History Compass, 5/1 (2007), pp. 112–58.
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Italy
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Barone, Giulia, Da frate Elia agli spiritual (Milan: Biblioteca francescana, 1999).
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Cammarosano, Paolo, Italia medievale: Strutture e geografia delle fonti scritte (Rome: La nuova Italia scientifica, 1991).
Collodo, Silvana, and Pinto, Giuliano, eds, La società médiévale (Bologna: Monduzzi Editore, 1999).
Crouzet-Pavan, Élisabeth, Enfers et paradis: L’Italie de Dante et de Giotto (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001).
Dean, Trevor, ed., The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Gaulin, Jean-Louis, Jamme, Armand, and Rouchon Mouilleron, Véronique, eds, Villes d’Italie: Texts et documents des XIIe, XIIIe, XIVe siècles (Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2005).
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Heullant-Donat, Isabelle, and Perol, Céline, Les Villes d’Italie du milieu du XIIe au milieu du XIVe siècle: Économies, sociétés, cultures, pouvoirs (approaches de la question) (Paris: Hachette, 2004).
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Toward Historical Ethnography: Notarial Records and Family History in the Middle Ages,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 7/2 (Mar. 1974), pp. 61–71.
Jehel, George, Les Villes d’Italie di XIIe au milieu du XIVe siècle: Sociétés, pouvoirs, économies, cultures (Nantes: Éditions du temps, 2004).
Langeli, Attilio Bartoli, Notai: serivere documenti nell’Italia medievale (Rome: Viella, 2006).
Larner, John, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216–1380 (London: Longman, 1980).
Maire Vigueur, Jean-Claude, “Révolution documentaire et révolution scripturaire: Le Cas de l’Italie médiévale,” Bibliothéque de l’École des chartes, 153/1 (Jan.–June 1995), pp. 177–85.
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Petrucci, Armando, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
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Smith, R. M., “The People of Tuscany and their Families in the Fifteenth Century: Medieval or Mediterranean?” Journal of Family History, 6 (1981), pp. 101–28.
Particular Studies on Italy
Allegrezza, Franca, Organizzazione del potere e dinamiche familiari: Gli Orsini dal Duecento agli inizi del Quattrocento, Nuovi studi storici, 44 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1998).
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Bordone, Renato, Castelnuovo, Guido, and Varanini, Gian Maria, Le aristocrazie dai signori rurali al patriziato, ed. Renato Bordone (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2004).
Brown, Judith C., and Davis, Robert C., eds, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (New York: Longman, 1998).
Brucker, Gene A., ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
Brucker, Gene A., Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).
Carocci, Sandro, Baroni di Roma: Dominazioni signorili e lignaggi aristocratici nel Duecento e nel primo Trecento, Nuovi studi storici, 23 (Rome: Istituto sorico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1993).
Carocci, Sandro, ed., La nobiltà romana nel Medioevo, Collection, 359 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2006).
Cavalca, Desiderio, “Il ceto magnatizio a Firenze dopo gli ordinamenti di giustizia,” Rivista di storia el diritto italiano, 40–1 (1967–8), pp. 85–132.
Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, Pistoia, Magnati e popolani nell’Italia comunale (Pistoia, 15–18 maggio 1995) (Pistoia: Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, 1997).
Chabot, Isabelle, “Widowhood and Poverty in Late Medieval Florence,” Continuity and Change, 3/2 (Aug. 1988), pp. 291–311.
Chabot, Isabelle, “La sposa in nero: La ritualizzazione del lutto delle vedove fiorentine (secoli XIV–XV),” Quaderni storici, 29/2 (Aug. 1994), pp. 421–62.
Chabot, Isabelle, “Lineage Strategies and the Control of Widows in Renaissance Florence,” in Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 127–44.
Chabot, Isabelle, “Reconstruction d’une famille: Les Ciurianni et leurs Ricordanze (1326–1429),” in Les Médiévistes de l’Université de Provence, eds, La Toscane et les Toscanes: Cadres de vie société, croyances (Mélanges offerts à Charles-M. de la Roncière) (Aix/Marseilles: Université de Provence, 1999), pp. 137–60.
Chojnacki, Stanley, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Cicchetti, Angelo, and Mordenti, Raul, I libri di famiglia in Italia, I: Filologia e storiografia letteraria (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1985).
Ciappelli, Giovanni, Una famiglia e le sue ricordanze: I Castellani di Firenze nel Tre-Quattrocento (Florence; Leo S. Olschki, 1995).
Ciappelli, Giovanni, and Rubin, Patricia Lee, eds, Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, ed., Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Cortese, Maria Elena, Signori, castelli, città: L’aristocrazia del territorio fiorentino tra X e XII secolo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007).
Crum, Roger J., and Paoletti, John T., eds, Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Dean, Trevor, and Lowe, K. J. P., eds, Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Epstein, Steven A., Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150–1250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Fabbri, Lorenzo, Alleanza matrimoniale e patrizio nella Firenze del ’400: Studio sulla famiglia Strozzi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007).
Friedman, David, “Places and the Street in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Italy,” in J. W. R. Whitehand and P. J. Larkham, eds, Urban Landscapes: International Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 69–113.
Frugoni, Chiara, A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. William McCuaig (1983; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Gasparri, Stefano, I milites cittadini: Studi sulla cavalleria in Italia, Nuovi studi storici, 19 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992).
Goldthwaite, Richard A., Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
Goldthwaite, Richard A., The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Grillo, Paolo, Cavalieri e popoli in armi: Le istituzioni militari nell’Italia médiévale (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2008).
Grubb, James S., Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Grubb, James S., Family Memoirs from Verona and Vicenza, 15th–16th Centuries (Rome: Viella, 2002).
Guzzetti, Linda, “Dowries in Fourteenth-Century Venice,” Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), pp. 430–73.
Heers, Jacques, Le Clan familial au Moyen Age: Étude sur les structures politiques et sociales des milieux urbains (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974).
Heers, Jacques, Parties and Political Life in the Medieval West, trans. David Nicholas; Europe in the Middle Ages, 7 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977).
Herlihy, David, “Family Solidarity in Medieval Italian History,” in David Herlihy, Robert S. Lopez and Vsevolod Slessarev, eds, Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy: Essays in Memory of Robert L. Reynolds (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1969), pp. 173–84.
Herlihy, David, “Mapping Households in Medieval Italy,” Catholic Historical Review, 58/1 (Apr. 1972), pp. 1–24.
Herlihy, David, The Family in Renaissance Italy, Forums in History, 125 (St Charles, MO: Forum Press, 1974).
Herlihy, David, “The Medieval Marriage Market,” in Dale B. J. Randall, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer 1974), no. 6 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976), pp. 3–27.
Herlihy, David, Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe: Historical Essays, ed. Anthony Molho (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995).
Herlihy, David, and Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); this is a partial English translation of Les Toscans et leur familles: Une étude du catasto de 1427 (Paris: L’École des hautes études en social sciences, 1978).
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa,” Past and Present, 66 (Feb. 1975), pp. 3–28.
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Domestic Ideals and Social Behavior: Evidence from Medieval Genoa,” in Charles Rosenberg, ed., The Family in History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 115–43.
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Kinsmen and Neighbors in Medieval Genoa,” in Harry A. Miskimin, David Herlihy, and A. L. Udovitch, eds, The Medieval City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 95–111.
Hughes, Diane Owen, “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,” Journal of Family History, 3/3 (Fall, 1978), 262–96.
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in John Bossy, ed., Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 69–99.
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Representing the Family: Portraits and Purposes in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17/1 (Summer, 1986), pp. 7–38.
Hughes, Diane Owen, “Invisible Madonnas? The Italian Historiographical Tradition and the Women of Medieval Italy,” in Susan Mosher Stuard, ed., Women in Medieval History and Historiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 25–57.
Jones, Philip J., “Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries in the Fourteenth Century,” Papers of the British School at Rome, 24 (1956), 183–205.
Jones, Philip J., Economia e società nell’Italia medievale (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1980).
Jones, Philip J., The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Kent, Dale, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Kent, Francis William, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
King, Margaret L., Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
King, Margaret L., The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Kirshner, Julius, Pursuing Honor while Avoiding Sin: The Monte delle Doti of Florence, Quaderni di Studi senesi, 41 (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1978).
Kirshner, Julius, “Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands in Late Medieval Italy,” in Julius Kirshner and Suzanne F. Wemple, eds, Women of the Medieval World: Essays in Honor of John H. Mundy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 256–303.
Kirshner, Julius, “Materials for a Gilded Cage: Non-Dotal Assets in Florence 1300–1500,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 184–207.
Kirshner, Julius, “Maritus lucretur totem uxoris sue premortue in Late Medieval Florence,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (Kanonistische Abteilung), 121 (1991), pp. 111–55.
Kirshner, Julius, and Molho, Anthony, “The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence,” Journal of Modern History, 50/3 (Sept. 1978), 403–38.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Ruptures de parenté et changements d’identité chez les magnats florentins du XIVe siécle,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 43/5 (Sept.–Oct. 1988), pp. 1205–40.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Women and the Family,” in Jacques Le Goff, ed., Medieval Callings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 285–311.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Kinship and Politics in Fourteenth-Century Florence,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller, eds, The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 208–28.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Honneur de noble, renommée de puissant: La Définition des magnats italiens (1280–1400),” Médiévales, 24 (Spring 1993), pp. 81–100.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “La Construction de l’identité sociale: Les Magnats dans la Florence de la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Bernard Lepetit, ed., Les Formes de l’expérience: Une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel SA, 1995), pp. 151–64, 326.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Family Trees and the Construction of Kinship in Renaissance Italy,” in Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Brigitte Soland, and Ulrike Strasser, eds, Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 101–14.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, L’Ombre des ancêtres: Essai sur l’imaginaire médiéval de la parenté (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, L’Arbe des familles (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2003).
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Retour à la cite: Les Magnats de Florence, 1340–1440 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 2006).
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Quel Moyen Age pour le nom?” in Monique Bourin, Jean-Marie Martin, and François Menant, eds, L’Anthroponymie: Document de l’histoire sociale des mondes méditerranéens médiévaux (Rome: École française de Rome, 1996), pp. 473–80.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Identité de sexe, identité de classe: Femmes nobles et populaires en Italie (XIVe–XVe siècles),” in André Burguière, Joseph Goy and Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, eds, L’Histoire grande ouverte: Hommages à Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 394–404.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Vrais et faux magnats: L’Application des ordonnances de justice au XIVe siècle,” in Magnati e popolani nell’Italia comunale (Pistoia, 15–18 maggio 1995), Quindicesimo convegno di studi (Pistoia: Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, 1997), pp. 273–91.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Un noble florentin à ses crayons: Lapo da Castiglionchio et sa généalogie,” in La Toscane et les Toscanes: Cadres de vie société, croyances (Mélanges offerts à Charles-M. de la Roncière) (Aix/Marseilles: Université de Provence, 1999), pp. 113– 35.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, “Les Acteurs politiques de la Florence communale (1350–1430),” in Jean Boutier, Sandro Landi, and Olivier Rouchon, eds, Florence et la Toscane, XIVe–XIXe siècles: Les Dynamiques d’un état italien (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004), pp. 217–39.
Kuehn, Thomas, Emancipation in Late Medieval Florence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982).
Kuehn, Thomas, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Kuehn, Thomas, “Law, Death, and Heirs in the Renaissance: Repudiation of Inheritance in Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly, 45/3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 484–516.
Kuehn, Thomas, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Kuehn, Thomas, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Lansing, Carol, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Lansing, Carol, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Communes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
La Roncière, Charles Marie de, “Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance,” in Philip Ariès and Georges Duby, eds, A History of Private Life, II: Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 157–309.
La Roncière, Charles Marie de, Firenze e le sue campagne nel Trecento: Mercanti, produzione, traffici; Biblioteca storica toscana, 48 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2005).
Leverotti, Franca, Famiglia e istituzioni nel medioevo italiano dal tardo antico al rinascimento (Rome: Carocci, 2005).
McKee, Sally, “Greek Women in Latin Households of Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete,” Journal of Medieval History, 19/3 (1993), pp. 229–49.
Maire Vigueur, Jean-Claude, ed., D’une ville à l’autre: Structures matérielles et organisation de l’espace dans les villes européenes (XIIIe–XVIe siècle) (Bologna: 2004); (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989).
Maire Vigueur, Jean-Claude, Cavalieri e cittadini: Guerra, conflitti e società nell’Italia comunale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); this is an Italian translation of Cavaliers et citoyens: guerre, conflits et société dans l’Italie communale, XIIe-XIIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes etudes en sciences socials, 2003).
Martines, Lauro, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Martines, Lauro, and Baca, Murtha, eds, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context (New York: Marsilio, 1994).
Menzinger, Sara, Giuristi e politic nei comuni di popolo: Siena, Perugia e Bologna, tre governi a confronto (Rome: Viella, 2006).
Milani, Giuliano, L’esclusione dal commune: Conflitti e bandi politici a Bologna e in altere città italiane tra XII e XIV secolo; Nuovi studi storici, 63 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 2003).
Molho, Anthony, “Visions of the Florentine Family in the Renaissance,” Journal of Modern History, 50/2 (June, 1978), pp. 304–11.
Molho, Anthony, “Deception and Marriage Strategy in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Women’s Ages,” Renaissance Quarterly, 41/2 (Summer 1987), pp. 193–217.
Molho, Anthony, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Mordenti, Raul, I libri di famiglia in Italia, II: geografia e storia. La memoria familiare, 4 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2001).
Ottokar, Nicola, Il comune di Firenze all fine del Dugento (1926; repr. 2nd edn, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1974).
Queller, Donald E., The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
Queller, Donald E., and Madden, Thomas F., “Father of the Bride: Fathers, Daughters, and Dowries in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46/4 (Winter 1993), pp. 685–711.
Pirillo, Paolo, Famiglia e mobilità sociale nella Toscana medievale: I Franzesi della Foresta da Figline Valdarno (secoli XII–XV) (Figline: Comune di Figline Valdarno, 1992).
Raveggi, Sergio, Tarassi, Massimo, Medici, Daniela, and Parenti, Patrizia, Ghibellini, Guelfi e Popolo Grasso: I detentori del potere politico a Firenze nella seconda metà del Dugento (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1978).
Rossetti, Gabriella, “Les Élites mercantili nell’Europa dei secoli XII–XVI: Loro cultura e radicamento,” in Alberto Grohmann, ed., Spazio urbano e organizzazione médiévale (Atti della session C23, Eleventh International Economic History Congress, Milano, 12–16 settembre 1994) (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1994), pp. 39–59.
Rubinstein, Nicolai, “La lotta contro i magnati a Firenze: La prima legge sul sodamento e la pace del Card. Latino,” Archivio storico italiano, 93/2 (1935), pp. 161–72.
Rubinstein, Nicolai, La lotta contro i magnati a Firenze: II, le origini della legge sul sodamento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1939).
Rubinstein, Nicolai, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 22 (1958), pp. 179–207.
Salvemini, Gaetano, Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295, ed. Ernesto Sestan. Opere di Gaetano Salvemini, 1. 2nd edn (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1974; for the twelve appendices see the first edition (Florence: G. Carnesecchi e figli, 1899), pp. 305–432).
Salvemini, Gaetano, La dignità cavalleresca nel Comune di Firenze a altri scritti, ed. Ernesto Sestan. Opere di Gaetano Salvemini, 2 (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1972).
Skinner, Quentin, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo Frescoes: Two Old Questions, Two New Answers,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 62 (1999), pp. 1–28.
Strocchia, Sharon T., Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Stuard, Susan Mosher, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Vallerani, Massimo, “La città e le sue istituzioni: Ceti dirigenti, oligarchia e politica nella medievistica italiana del Novecento,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 20 (1994), pp. 165–220.
Black Death and its Consequences
Aberth, John, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Benedictow, Ole J., The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004).
Bowsky, William M., ed., The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
Carmichael, Ann G., Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Arnold, 2002).
Herlihy, David, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. with an introduction by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Horrox, Rosemary, ed., The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
Twigg, Graham, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (London: Batsford, 1984).
Further Reading
The study of urban élites and families in late medieval cities has produced a large bibliography, especially for Italy. The extensive bibliography below is indicative of that. Casey, History of the Family, remains a good introduction to the study of the European family. Carol Neel in Medieval Families has collected the foundational articles. David Herlihy in Medieval Households takes a wider approach with a clearly structured analysis of the family. The volumes by Jack Goody listed in the bibliography are important for his questions about the family in Europe and give a beginning to a comparative perspective to the wider world. Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, Mitchell, Family Life in the Middle Ages, and Crawford, European Sexualities, bring the literature more up-to-date.
For Italy, among the best works in English that reflect the state of the scholarship are in the collections edited by David Abulafia, Italy in the Central Middle Ages, and John Najemy, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance. Several French and Italian scholars, such as Ascheri, Boucheron, Gilli, Menant, Milani, and Racine have produced excellent introductions to the history of these cities.
Two collections contain important articles on élites and dominating classes: Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, Les Élites urbaines au Moyen Age, and Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, Pistoia, Magnati e popolani nell’Italia comunale. For particular Italian élite families see Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, and Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence. For wider perspectives on the politics, society and economy of Florence, whose history still dominates much of the scholarship, see the recent books by John M. Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (New York: Blackwell, 2006) and Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). The classic studies of magnates in Florence are Salvemini, Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295 and Ottokar, Il comune di Firenze all fine del Dugento. They must be read in conjunction with Raveggi, et al., Ghibellini, Guelfi e Popolo Grasso, Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, and George W. Dameron, “Revisiting the Italian Magnates: Church Property, Social Conflict, and Political Legitimization in the Thirteenth Century Commune,” Viator, 23 (1992), 167–87. Klapisch-Zuber carries the study of magnate families into the fourteenth century in her recent Retour à la cité: les magnats de Florence. For some comparisons of families and local cultures and politics within Italy see the works listed in the bibliography by Allegrezza, Carocci, Chojnacki, King, Queller, and Vallerani.
One can approach the marriage strategies, legal options, and social institutions for Italians living within the context of the ius commune and Roman Law through the numerous publications by Chabot, Herlihy, Hughes, Kirshner, Klapisch-Zuber, Kuehn, and Molho. The controversies over the Black Death and its consequences are discussed in Sam Cohn’s The Black Death. Lastly, the collection edited by Roger Crum and John Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, contains important essays on urban space, art, and society in Florence.