La famiglia nell’economia europea secoli XIII–XVIII (review)

La famiglia nell’economia europea secoli XIII–XVIII comprises forty-three essays in Italian, English, French, Spanish, and German (one). In addition to poor editing and, in some cases, inadequate English translation, the volume evinces uneven scholarship. It neither advances new, provocative theses about the history of the family and its economic role in pre-industrial Europe nor applies innovative research methods. That the history of the family has long been at the center of lively debates and fertile cross-disciplinary collaborations in the humanities and social sciences is not the object of any consequential reflection. Most of the contributions either discuss isolated cases studies or offer a bird’s eye view of a topic based on secondary literature.

Experts in the field will not learn any important new lessons about such classic topics as the transition from partible inheritance to primogeniture, the role of marital alliances in elite class formation, and the function of dowries in commercial and artisanal activities. (Little attention is devoted to peasants, in part because of the paucity of primary sources and in part because of the topics selected by the authors who responded to the call for papers.) Historians of the family may thus wish to consult the table of contents online to determine whether any of the essays pique their curiosity.¹ For non-specialists, the absence of a comprehensive thematic bibliography limits the usefulness of this collective volume. Finally, unlike older proceedings of the conferences held by the Datini International Institute of Economic History, this one does not include a transcript of the Q&A sessions, during which controversial ideas are aired and debated.

The most substantial piece in the volume is Tina de Moor, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Jacob Zuijerduijn’s study of the credit market in a Dutch mid-size town and its surrounding countryside from 1452 to 1563. On the basis of a large dataset and an initial but revealing comparison with fifteenth-century Tuscany, the authors argue that women of all social strata had considerably more access to capital markets in Holland than in Italy. Although only partially based on original research, other essays nonetheless contribute insightful syntheses and suggest new research venues, particularly Giovanni Ceccarelli’s on marine insurance and Simon Teuscher’s on property devolution in the late Middle Ages. Surprisingly, only one author (Ariadne Schmidt) mentions and engages with de Vries’ concept of “industrious revolution,” undoubtedly the boldest recent reassessment of the economic role of women’s work and the household in pre-industrial Europe.²