Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence.

By Anthony Molho (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994. xiv plus 458pp. $59.00).

A generation ago Philip Jones made perhaps the most quoted of all modern observations about the history of Renaissance Florence: that it came down to the history of the city's principal families. The family diaries or ricordanze that Jones thus justified studying are one of the sources used by Anthony Molho that in his exhaustive examination of the marriage and dowry practices of those that leading Florentine families. But only one: Molho's research is so prodigious and its significance so encompassing that his handsomely produced book can be compared only with David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's monumental study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427, Les Toscans et leurs families. Like it, Molho's Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence is a monument of empirical research and an articulate analysis of vast documentation. If Molho's findings are debatable on crucial points, he has nonetheless authoritatively set the terms of debate on the significance of marriage among the sociopolitical elites of the Renaissance Italian cities. marriage among the sociopolitical

Culminating nearly two decades of research, much of it in productive partnership with Julius Kirshner, Molho's book eschews theory and minimizes engagement with the vast historiography of Florentine society to concentrate on the sources, their interrelations, and what they indicate about how Florentines arranged and financed their marriages from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth-centuries. The result is a compendium of authoritative accounts of the institutional structures of Florentine marriage, especially at the upper levels. Foremost among those structures was the Dowry Fund, the the state-run vehicle in which Florentines invested in order to accrue dowries for their daughters. Molho provides a magisterial narrative history of the Fund, for whose availability, he argues persuasively, had a powerful influence on marriage patterns. He traces the evolving and progressively closer links between the Dowry Fund and the broader system of the public debt (though not without some confusion owing to his references to both by the term monte). He supplements Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber's study by analyzing the Florentine population as reported in the Catasto of 1480. Above all, he painstakingly pulls these strands together into a profile of the social and dotal significance of 19,066 marriages recorded in the archives of the Dowry Fund, focusing on the social standing of the 38,132 spouses. His procedure in guiding the reader through this vast inquiry, helpfully previewed in the introductory chapter, is a model of methodological forthrightness, with each kind of information carefully explained, inevitable uncertainties openly addressed, working decisions fully discussed. It is an impressive display of scholarly thoroughness and candor.

But the conclusions that Molho draws from his exploration of this immense data base are problematical. He takes as his point of departure the long-term continuity of the Florentine ruling class. Guided by prescriptive writings of Florentines in private ricordanze and formal treatises and by the example of individual family lines whose marriages he reconstructs in detail, he attributes the ruling class's success in "beat[ing] the odds for extinction" to their observance of a cultural ideal of "tight alliance" through intermarriage (termed homogamy) (p. 11). In holding that upper-class Florentines were committed to marrying one another Molho has lots of scholarly company. But he wants to go further, to determine on the basis of a systematic examination of the Catasto and Dowry Fund archives precisely "to what extent these Florentines were able to implement this ideology" of homogamy (p. 231). His finding, and the thesis of the book, is that a "high homogamic tendency" was indeed "at the foundation of the social world" of the Florentine ruling class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (pp. 338-9)

This conclusion is the product of Molho's exhaustive investigation of the linkages forged in the 19,066 marriages. The template he applies to the marriages is a hierarchy of five categories into which he groups the people of Florence on the basis of their Catasto entries and their families' record in governmental office. To manage this sea of data Molho made two critical decisions that open his analysis to question. One was to consider all persons with a particular surname as members of an internally coherent lineage, sharing its political, economic, and--crucially--matrimonial characteristics. The other, even more controversial, was to propose a ruling class consisting of 417 of those lineages, which collectively accounted for no less than 34.2 percent of Florence's population in 1480. One-third of the population is, to say the least, a remarkably broad construction of an Italian urban ruling class. Molho does identify 110 "high-status" lineages as the inner circle of the ruling class, though even this elite constituted 17.7 percent of the Florentine population. (The figures are displayed in a table on p. 211.) Nevertheless, he frames his overall assessment of ruling class endogamy with reference to the entire classification of 417 lineages, including its "high-status," "status," and "low-status" components. and

So generously defined a ruling class, offering its members so wide a variety of potential spouses, might well be expected to have practiced strict endogamy. Remarkably, Molho's figures reveal, on the contrary, that they married outside their class more than one-third of the time, getting only 63 percent of their spouses from other ruling class families. The patterns are clearly displayed in tables on pp. 287, 288, and 289 (where two digits are inverted in the last figure on line one). They show that even the inner circle of 110 lineages, the figure high-status ones most likely to follow the Dominican moralist Giovanni figure Dominici's injunction to "stay with your own kind" (p. 233), were open to figure outsiders: three of every ten (30.9 percent) of their spouses came from outside the ruling class as a whole, more than half (54.5 percent) from outside their own elite membership. Absorbing these figures, one may agree in general with Molho's conclusion that "The practice of homogamy, rather than hyper- or with hypogamy, best describes the marriage alliances of members of the Florentine ruling class" (p. 297). But it is far less evident that this two-to-one ratio of homogamy to heterogamy constituted "tight alliance," let alone that it could have constituted the basis of an enduring social equilibrium in Florence, except in a safety-valve sort of way. equilibrium in Florence, except

The lack of fit between Molho's figures and his claims for them may derive from his own ambivalence regarding the extent of the ruling class. At times he includes all three components, at other times he focuses on the high-status inner circle. This ambivalence is reflected in his efforts to project Florentine marriage patterns onto a larger European plane. He notes (p. 294) that the 45.5 percent rate of endogamy among the high-status Florentine inner circle compares favorably with T. H. Hollingsworth's finding of 41.3 percent endogamy among British peers from 1600 to 1624. Elsewhere (pp.14-15), he compares John Cannon's figures of 60 to 72 percent endogamy for the eighteenth-century British peerage with the Florentine ruling class as a whole. Yet in either case differences in context make such a comparison dubious; in the seventeenth century the British peerage never exceeded some 160-170 families in a total population of more than four million, and the overwhelming part of their exogamous unions were with the knights, squirerarchy, and gentry, which collectively constituted at most 4-5 percent of the population. These portions are vastly different from the high-status inner circle's 17.7 percent of Florence's population, let alone the 34.2 percent of it that belonged to Molho's broadly constructed ruling class as a whole. Molho's

In any event, a landed national aristocracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems less apt for comparison with Florence's ruling class than another Italian urban elite in the fifteenth. One such is Venice's patriciate, which in that century included some 160 lineages, more or less comparable to the high status group in Florence. Molho notes correctly the lack of research on other Italian cities similar to his on Florence; indeed, the unique riches of the Florentine documentation make that unlikely. But available sampling suggests an endogamy rate among Venetian patricians of 91 percent. There are important differences in size and status between the two patriciates, which invite a full-scale study. But at the very least it appears that compared with its Venetian counterpart the Florentine ruling class, even its inner circle, was a truly open elite, liberally exogamous. circle, was a truly open

And yet Molho's broader thesis, that the centuries-long pre-eminence of certain Florentine families owed much to the consistent practice of matrimonial alliance preached by so many contemporaries and echoed in so much recent historiography, does ring true. In the end, one suspects that at the center of Florence's population was an elite core of families that indeed practiced tight endogamy, the observation of which influenced Molho's overall conclusions but that eluded his aggregate analysis. Indeed, in the case studies that give flesh and blood to his statistics he regularly refers to an undefined group whose familiar names dominate Florentine history and historiography. His reconstructions of the marriages of individual branches of these eminent lineages provide the clearest evidence of tight alliance. Thus his tracking of 189 marriages of one Rinuccini line shows it to have been 57.7 percent endogamous with other high-status lineages, 89.6 percent endogamous with the ruling class as a whole (p. 242); and Alberti, Guicciardini, and Martelli lines are similarly shown with combined totals of 61.8 percent high-status endogamy, 83.9 percent overall ruling-class endogamy (p. 296). The patterns of spouse selection of these multi-generational family lines resemble those of the Venetian patriciate more than of any, let alone all, of the three strata of Molho's ruling class. Could they be the real Florentine patricians (a term that Molho seems uncomfortable with)?

At several points Molho wrestles with the question of the relationship between those families and the ruling class as a whole. He recognizes for example that carefully assembled evidence of "the propensity of Florentines of the Rinuccini's social standing to be strikingly restrictive in the selection of their spouses" and the manipulation of large bodies of data for the rest of society lead to conclusions that "are not strictly commensurable" (p. 274). Yet in the end the sheer momentum of his methodology, with its homogenizing of lineages and its large ruling class, leads him to assert homogamy not only where his own evidence makes it undeniable--as with particular Rinuccini, Alberti, Guicciardini, Martelli and other families--but among the entire inclusive three-tiered ruling class, whose marriage patterns seem more likely to have promoted social stability by their openness than by tight alliances with each other.

Molho's forthrightness in confronting difficulties in his analysis, and the thoroughness of his presentation--his inclusion of both individual cases like the Rinuccini's and the aggregate analysis of broad categories--give his book a methodological interest as great as its substantive contribution to the study of Renaissance society. How does one blend reconstruction of nuanced individual cases with manipulation of data involving an entire society, microhistory with macrohistory? And on the basis of which does one formulate characterizations of social culture? These were difficult questions for Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, which they pursued beyond their great collaborative work. They are equally vexatious ones in Molho's complex, stimulating book, lurking under, and sometimes breaking, the surface of his quantitative methodology. With his weighty contribution to this discourse, he enriches it at the same time that he presents historians of the Renaissance, in Florence and elsewhere, with a powerful array of erudition and ideas to ponder, to debate, and to place firmly in their stock of indispensable works.