Banks, Palaces and Entrepreneurs in Renaissance Florence.

Richard A. Goldthwaite. Banks, Palaces and Entrepreneurs in Renaissance Florence. (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 492.) Aldershot, Hampshire and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1995. x + 315 pp. $87.50. ISBN: n.a.

This collection of nine articles covers two decades of scholarship by Richard Goldthwaite and showcases the impressive range and depth of his investigations in Renaissance economic history. They are grouped under three headings: the world of the entrepreneur; banks and prices; and palaces. The first chapter explores entrepreneurial attitudes and urban values characterizing Florentine patrician culture. Goldthwaite argues that Renaissance concepts such as magnificence and civilta incorporated economic outlooks condoning consumption of material goods and monetized human relations that distinguished them from earlier, medieval corporate values and suspiciousness of wealth. Thus, the Italian Renaissance ushered in a whole new world of goods that in turn stimulated demand and supply. Heightened interest in the material aspects of life expressed itself variously, whether in commercial practices taught young men at scuole d'abbaco (chapter two) or in the economic organization of family life, which, Goldthwaite argues, centered increasingly in nuclear households as a result of the centrifugal effects of economic change and practices of partible inheritance (chapter three). Although Goldthwaite has modified some of his earlier views on the family, his analysis of account books underscores a decrease in long-term, formal economic ties among relatives and the tenuousness of mercantile fortunes beginning in the late fourteenth century. In his view, these developments "liberated" wealth for faster circulation in the marketplace (chapter three).

The second section picks up one of Goldthwaite's favorite themes: that Florentine economic history can be written adequately without mentioning the Medici family, who dominated the city's political affairs and so much subsequent historiography. To wit, his chapter on local banking - as distinct from the international financial empires of families like the Medici - illustrates the active local banking scene of money-changing, high-level pawnbroking via jewels, current accounts, and time deposits that helped free capital while sidestepping usury laws. The next chapter on the Medici bank is a fitting companion to the previous one, for both contest conclusions of Raymond De Roover, the premier historian of the Medici bank. Goldthwaite moves his analysis of the Medici companies out of the counting house and into the world of power, a place readers in the 1990s will find congenial. Subsequent research modifies his suggestion that the Medici failed to use their political power to gain influence in the banking sector, especially in Rome, but his basic point remains valid that the Medici did not single-handedly control the Florentine economy or the wider world of Florentine international business through their bank.

The sixth chapter on grain prices from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries illuminates another facet of the Florentine merchant's world, for determining real prices of grain involves understanding fluctuations in the value of monies and labor costs, concerns that Florentine merchants addressed daily. Goldthwaite's conclusion that the average fifteenth-century Florentine worker was better off than his peers in Northern Europe connects to the final three articles on palace construction, for there he draws our attention to relations between wealthy merchants and the workers who built those massive private palaces that still dominate the Florentine urban landscape. Goldthwaite has treated palace building and furnishing in two other books, and their conclusions regarding the development of a Renaissance consumer culture need no reiteration here. The chapters on the palace as domestic architecture and the construction of the Strozzi Palace (chapters eight and nine) model the type of economic history Goldthwaite practices that uses economic data to pursue larger cultural issues. Already twenty-five years ago he began addressing subjects such as mentalites and the domestic roles of women and children, which perhaps explains why readers continue to find his work relevant and highly suggestive.

MELISSA MERIAM BULLARD University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill