Merchant Writers

"These merchant writings paint a wonderfully candid, varied, and vivid portrait of the practical realities that confronted the fourteenth-century Italian merchant; they depict the social, political, and economic milieu through which he forged his way, at times with a handful of florins, at others with bales of wool, casks of wine, and other merchandise, and, more often than one might have thought, with the help of a dagger or sword." -- Tobias Foster Gittes, Liberal Arts College, Concordia University "The memoirs and family histories in Merchant Writers will interest historians, anthropologists, and scholars of cultural studies, as well as those curious about Florentine families in the days of Boccaccio. Murtha Baca's translation is truly outstanding, a superb job done with competence and exquisite taste." -- Paolo Cherchi, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

This new English translation of Merchant Writers includes all the texts from the original Italian edition in their entirety. Moreover, it offers a gripping personal introduction to the mercantile world of medieval and Renaissance Florence.

The birthplace of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and the powerful Medici family, Florence was also the first great banking and commercial centre of continental Europe. The city’s middle-class merchants, though lacking the literary virtuosity of its most famous sons, were no less prolific as writers of account books, memoirs, and diaries. Written by ordinary men, these first-hand accounts of commercial life recorded the everyday realities of their businesses, families, and personal lives alongside the high drama of shipwrecks, plagues, and political conspiracies.

Published in Italian in 1986, Vittore Branca’s collection of these accounts established the importance of the genre to the study of Italian society and culture. This new English translation of Merchant Writers includes all the texts from the original Italian edition in their entirety. Moreover, it offers a gripping personal introduction to the mercantile world of medieval and Renaissance Florence.