Renaissance Florence

Renaissance Florence is a solid and very readable synthesis of one of the great cities. Drawing on post-war scholarship, and his own PhD work in the archivio de stato, Brucker describes the city in terms of its daily life, dipping through personal letters, business ledgers, and official pronouncements to render the proud and industrious people of Florence at a time when they were the leading city in Europe.

Renaissance Florence was a densely packed urban warren. The city's wealth came from mastery of cloth manufacture, which became the foundation of a European mercantile and banking network. Social life was defined by dense ties between classes, ranging from living on the same street, to rents and patronage, to the complexities of the show more largely unincorporated laborers and farmers, to the twenty one official guilds and their control of public offices, to the wealthy magnate families who dominated the apex of power but were officially banned from office. It's a complex web who's form shifted a lot over the nearly 200 years covered by the book, but out of this arose the scholarship and artistic creativity that birthed the renaissance. Conversely, the 14th century was also a dark time for the city, marked by the Black Death, recurrent war, and economic stagnation. It's odd that this period, in many ways objectively less prosperous than the ones that preceded and followed it, came to be the Renaissance.

Brucker has a keen awareness for social history, and for the ways in which his sources are representative or unrepresentative of their larger community. He gently chides Marxists for trying to fit the Florentines into a strictly orthodox structure of revolutionary classes, while maintaining an awareness of how birth defined the largely conservative order of his subjects world. This book would make a great major text for a undergraduate class focused on Renaissance Florence, supported by some context for the world and a few chosen primary sources. The biggest strike against it is that published in 1969, it's old, and I'm not sure what new scholarship has revealed. show less

Orig. publ. 1969; reprinted with supplements 1983