Description
Book SynopsisStudies of late medieval Tuscany have traditionally relied on historiographical premises derived from the experience of its intensely investigated capital city. Specifically, normative and quantitative data from Florentine sources have been employed to chart demographic, social, and economic trends during the communal age and across the period of the Black Death and its aftermath. The results have invited instructive comparisons with other regions of Italy, as well as other parts of Europe. At the same time, however, the focus on Florence in its role as a metropolitan center belies the conceptual problems inherent in the modern definition of “region,” applicable only with hindsight to medieval juridical and topographical boundaries. The essays in this volume offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony. While they cover a range of topics, they all provide evidence of the important resources available to scholars working in provincial Tuscan archives and the volume offers an excellent sampling of the state of scholarship on these Italian communities.
Table of ContentsIntroduction by Thomas W. Blomquist and Maureen F. Mazzaoui
Lucca, 1430-94: The Politics of the Restored Republic by Michael E. Bratchel
Public Policy and Private Profit: Tax Farming in Fourteenth-Century Lucca by Christine Meek
Archival Inventorying in Fourteenth-Century Lucca: Methodologies, Theories, and Practices by Antonio Romiti
Coluccio Salutati, Chancellor of the Republic of Lucca, and the Problem of the
Minute di Riformagioni Pubbliche (1370-71) by Giorgio Tori
Pisan Consular Families in the Communal Age: The Anfossi and the Ebriaci (or Verchionesi or da Parlascio) in the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries by Maria Luisa Ceccarelli-Lemut
The Political and Economic Relations of Pisa and the Guelph League in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries by Emilio Cristiani
Siena in the Fourteenth Century: State, Territory, and Culture by Mario Ascheri
From Development to Crisis: Changing Urban Structures in Siena between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries by Duccio Balestracci
Economy and Society in Southern Tuscany in the Late Middle Ages: Amiata and the Maremma by Gabriella Piccinni
