the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy by RichardK. MarshallReview by: Lauro MartinesThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 275-276Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/207162 .

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REVIEWS 275

pensity to summarize (and often quote) the work of others at length, a practice that, when coupled with a surfeit of opaque jargon, makes for an ocean of tiresome and often confusing prose.

Last, but far from least, Verges is unable to keep her own deep involvement with those seeking to end Reunion's dependence on France from transforming this book into the kind of accusatory tract that, in her preface, she readily admits that it might be. As this volume unfortunately demonstrates only too clearly, to indulge one's passions- theoretical and otherwise-is one thing; to do good history is something else.

Richard B. Allen Worcester, Massachusetts

The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy. By Richard K. Marshall (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 191 pp. $42.50

Drawing on forty-five unpublished ledgers kept by retailers in four- teenth-century Prato, Marshall brings new light to the commerce, contacts, supplies, and ethos of such minor tradesmen as druggists, stationers, cloth and cheese vendors, tailors, wallers, and hawkers of secondhand goods. He circumvents the charted world of international merchants and bankers to consider the lineaments of the retail trade, in which credit, payment in kind (barter), and petty lending were perfectly routine. Interest rates of o0 to 30 percent prevailed; pawn taking was common; and customers' debts might be carried in account books for months. Relying on local bankers and brokers, retailers often drew on a line of credit to enable them suddenly to acquire supplies in bulk. Cheeses and salted fish came from as far away as Sardinia and Dubrovnik, but, interestingly, none of the author's retailers sold vegetables, which came mostly from local garden plots.

In Prato's world of petty shopkeeping, independent women opera- tors were usually widows; they surfaced in the record for limited periods. Moreover, women constituted a mere io percent of retailers' customers. Some feminists will dislike these findings.

Names, quantities, specific prices, purchase and payment dates, and concrete brokerage operations all give substance and color to Marshall's wise and resonant study. Surprisingly, shops were frequently open on Sundays and even Christmas. Contrary to early guild rules, shopkeepers often extended credit, and though barter was common, the author found no cases in which luxuries, such as cloaks or silver buttons, were traded for goods or labor.

How to use this book for interdisciplinary study is not readily evident, unless, moving over the subsoil of daily business conduct and expectation, we speak of a system of strong pragmatic values in which

REVIEWS 275

pensity to summarize (and often quote) the work of others at length, a practice that, when coupled with a surfeit of opaque jargon, makes for an ocean of tiresome and often confusing prose.

Last, but far from least, Verges is unable to keep her own deep involvement with those seeking to end Reunion's dependence on France from transforming this book into the kind of accusatory tract that, in her preface, she readily admits that it might be. As this volume unfortunately demonstrates only too clearly, to indulge one's passions- theoretical and otherwise-is one thing; to do good history is something else.

Richard B. Allen Worcester, Massachusetts

The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy. By Richard K. Marshall (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 191 pp. $42.50

Drawing on forty-five unpublished ledgers kept by retailers in four- teenth-century Prato, Marshall brings new light to the commerce, contacts, supplies, and ethos of such minor tradesmen as druggists, stationers, cloth and cheese vendors, tailors, wallers, and hawkers of secondhand goods. He circumvents the charted world of international merchants and bankers to consider the lineaments of the retail trade, in which credit, payment in kind (barter), and petty lending were perfectly routine. Interest rates of o0 to 30 percent prevailed; pawn taking was common; and customers' debts might be carried in account books for months. Relying on local bankers and brokers, retailers often drew on a line of credit to enable them suddenly to acquire supplies in bulk. Cheeses and salted fish came from as far away as Sardinia and Dubrovnik, but, interestingly, none of the author's retailers sold vegetables, which came mostly from local garden plots.

In Prato's world of petty shopkeeping, independent women opera- tors were usually widows; they surfaced in the record for limited periods. Moreover, women constituted a mere io percent of retailers' customers. Some feminists will dislike these findings.

Names, quantities, specific prices, purchase and payment dates, and concrete brokerage operations all give substance and color to Marshall's wise and resonant study. Surprisingly, shops were frequently open on Sundays and even Christmas. Contrary to early guild rules, shopkeepers often extended credit, and though barter was common, the author found no cases in which luxuries, such as cloaks or silver buttons, were traded for goods or labor.

How to use this book for interdisciplinary study is not readily evident, unless, moving over the subsoil of daily business conduct and expectation, we speak of a system of strong pragmatic values in which

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 21:04:59 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

276 CAROL BRESNAHAN MENNING

the mighty florin was king and bankruptcy dishonor and sin. The "arithmetic order" (rigorous accounting procedures) of the Tuscans may touch the "cultural foundations" of the "taste for the geometrical or- ganization of space" in the "Florentine art of the Renaissance" (xiv). But this old neo-Marxist notion is dubious on many grounds, not least because Marshall's tradesmen employed neither arabic numerals nor double-entry bookkeeping in their ledgers, despite their use in Italy ever since the early fourteenth century.

More striking, instead, is the fact that concealed interest on small loans and on some credit sales made for regular income, despite the Church's well-known strictures against such practice. Moreover, few "usurers" made death-bed confessions of ill-gotten gains. How then did shopkeepers square the taking of interest with conscience? Most histo- rians probably take for granted theforce-majeure argument that by doing what everyone else was doing, merchants were simply dismissing Church doctrine as inconsequential. Maybe so, but the point needs to be argued, since it is a claim about the nature and balance of religious belief in early-Renaissance Italy.

Lauro Martines University of California, Los Angeles

The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600. By Louis Haas (New York, St. Martin's Press, I998) 319 pp. $49.95

Resting on literary sources, ricordi and ricordanze, this book promises an examination of the attitudes and practices of fathers from Florence's elite vis-a-vis their children. The title, however, is misleading; some of Haas' more cogent points do not involve fathers at all. An informative chapter on the birth process, for instance, relies on ricordanze kept by fathers, but reveals more about mothers and midwives.

This book has several strengths. Haas reviews the historiography of Renaissance childhood, pointing out the considerable revision in the field since the publication, forty years ago, of Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood (Paris, 1960). He offers a sharp critique of intemperate historical psychoanalyzing of childhood-for example, Stone's sugges- tion that swaddling created emotionally warped children.l The author makes sensitive use of ricordanze, many of them unpublished, from the Florentine archives. He presents fascinating evidence that adoption was not as rare as previously thought; given the acceptance of adoption in ancient Rome, one wonders why humanists did not propagate the practice. He also offers the provocative idea that humanist critiques of wetnursing were sexist, since a mother who sent her child to a balia was dangerously "free" (91).

I Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston, I98i).

276 CAROL BRESNAHAN MENNING

the mighty florin was king and bankruptcy dishonor and sin. The "arithmetic order" (rigorous accounting procedures) of the Tuscans may touch the "cultural foundations" of the "taste for the geometrical or- ganization of space" in the "Florentine art of the Renaissance" (xiv). But this old neo-Marxist notion is dubious on many grounds, not least because Marshall's tradesmen employed neither arabic numerals nor double-entry bookkeeping in their ledgers, despite their use in Italy ever since the early fourteenth century.

More striking, instead, is the fact that concealed interest on small loans and on some credit sales made for regular income, despite the Church's well-known strictures against such practice. Moreover, few "usurers" made death-bed confessions of ill-gotten gains. How then did shopkeepers square the taking of interest with conscience? Most histo- rians probably take for granted theforce-majeure argument that by doing what everyone else was doing, merchants were simply dismissing Church doctrine as inconsequential. Maybe so, but the point needs to be argued, since it is a claim about the nature and balance of religious belief in early-Renaissance Italy.

Lauro Martines University of California, Los Angeles

The Renaissance Man and His Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300-1600. By Louis Haas (New York, St. Martin's Press, I998) 319 pp. $49.95

Resting on literary sources, ricordi and ricordanze, this book promises an examination of the attitudes and practices of fathers from Florence's elite vis-a-vis their children. The title, however, is misleading; some of Haas' more cogent points do not involve fathers at all. An informative chapter on the birth process, for instance, relies on ricordanze kept by fathers, but reveals more about mothers and midwives.

This book has several strengths. Haas reviews the historiography of Renaissance childhood, pointing out the considerable revision in the field since the publication, forty years ago, of Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood (Paris, 1960). He offers a sharp critique of intemperate historical psychoanalyzing of childhood-for example, Stone's sugges- tion that swaddling created emotionally warped children.l The author makes sensitive use of ricordanze, many of them unpublished, from the Florentine archives. He presents fascinating evidence that adoption was not as rare as previously thought; given the acceptance of adoption in ancient Rome, one wonders why humanists did not propagate the practice. He also offers the provocative idea that humanist critiques of wetnursing were sexist, since a mother who sent her child to a balia was dangerously "free" (91).

I Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston, I98i).

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 21:04:59 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions