La Révolte des Ciompi: Les hommes, les lieux, le Travail by Alessandro Stella; ChristianeKlapisch-ZuberReview by: Lauro MartinesThe American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), p. 510Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2169050 .

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510 Reviews of Books

the judicial system. Was there anything distinctive about Florence?

CHARLES M. RADDING

Michigan State University

ALESSANDRO STELLA. La revolte des Ciompi: Les hommes, les lieux, le travail. Foreword by CHRISTIANE KLAPISCH- ZUBER. (Recherches d'histoire et de sciences socia- les/Studies in History and the Social Sciences, num- ber 37.) Paris: tcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. 1993. Pp. 368.

This is the best study ever done of the Ciompi (1378), the famous insurrection of workers in the Florentine wool industry. Alessandro Stella challenges a whole historiographic tradition, which is largely paternalis- tic in slant, and vastly extends the scope of the underlying debate by introducing a wealth of new material on gonfaloni (official neighborhood units), the hierarchy of Florentine trades, and the urban- spatial scatter of occupations, wealth, and poverty. The approach is quantitative, the concern with method is sustained, and the result is a formidable inquiry with lessons for the social topography and textile industries of major cities in other parts of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Stella argues that the Ciompi were not a mob of ten thousand have-nots acting without a program or neighborhood organization. He finds that they had local and workshop solidarities, pursued concrete revolutionary objectives, knew how to make their clamorous bid for power, and had an echelon of practical, literate, able leaders. To extend the ground of these findings, most of the book is given to a delineation of occupational, wage, household, and neighborhood structures. Relying chiefly on tax records, he ranges over the years from 1352 to 1427.

Stella's overarching conclusion is remarkable and will not please the many historians who maintain that in the preindustrial city the networks of vertical relations between powerful patrons and clients elim- inated the horizontal divisions of class. Renaissance Florence was, he finds, two cities: one for the rich and respectable, the other for the disreputable poor (among whom a quite disproportionate number were women). About a third of the Florentine population was officially designated as "wretched" (miserabili), and another 15 to 20 percent lived from hand to mouth. In the course of the fourteenth century, moreover, increasing numbers of wool workers and new immigrants settled in the city's peripheral areas, such as the outer parts of Ferza, Bue Nero, Unicorno, and Lion d'Oro. There, amid rows of small houses, rents and property values were much cheaper.

By contrast, the old city center (Vipera, Carro, Nicchio, and Scala) remained the primary ground of the political heavyweights, the rich and the wellborn. Here, too, servants and people in the service trades were also to be seen in numbers. But the wretched, the semiskilled, and the lowly workers of the wool

industry resided mainly in the outer precincts, the new city walled in between 1284 and 1333. There was "un v&ritable melange des groupes sociaux" only in an intermediate region of "zones-tampons" (p. 266).

Center and periphery thus made for an old and new city. Apparently unknown to himself, Stella pro- vides the historical background for two imaginary cities of the age: L. B. Alberti's plan of an inner and outer city, for the upper and lower classes respec- tively; and Leonardo da Vinci's vision of a two-tiered city, the upper one for gentlefolk and the lower one for workers and indecorous tradesmen. No social historian of the period will want to overlook Stella's book.

LAURO MARTINES University of California, Los Angeles

MODERN EUROPE LONDA SCHIEBINGER. Nature's Body: Gender in the Mak- ing of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon. 1993. Pp. viii, 289. $25.00.

The stated purpose of Londa Schiebinger's book is "to explore how gender-both the real relations between the sexes and ideological renderings of those relations-shaped European science in the eigh- teenth century, and natural history in particular" (p. 2). Key to her story, which also includes race, is the fact that eighteenth-century naturalists were almost exclusively white males. She offers a wealth of in- stances supporting the claim that "who does science affects the kind of science that gets done" (p. 3).

Previous studies have already presented this mes- sage in compelling fashion with respect to the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries (see especially Cynthia Eagle Russett's Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood [1989], and Donna Haraway's Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science [1989]), and, given the androcentrism evident in biological writings from at least as far back as Aristotle, one should not be surprised to find evi- dence of the same in the eighteenth century. Still, the abundance and variety of examples offered by Schiebinger is impressive. If male biologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fond of discoursing on adventurous sperm and passive ova, naturalists of the eighteenth century were equally or even more enthusiastic in writing their social assump- tions into their representations of nature.

Schiebinger argues that Carolus Linnaeus's "sexual system" of plant classification sanctioned heterosexu- ality and "marriage" and gave primacy to males over females. Linnaeus's choice of the mammary glands as the key taxonomic feature on which to characterize the class of "mammals" also had a social context: by emphasizing "breasts" in the class of animals to which humans belong, he was endorsing and promoting the view that mothers should stay home and nurse their

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995

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