The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy (review)

The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy. By Richard K. Marshall (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 191 pp. $42.50

Drawing on forty-five unpublished ledgers kept by retailers in fourteenth-century Prato, Marshall brings new light to the commerce, contacts, supplies, and ethos of such minor tradesmen as druggists, stationers, cloth and cheese vendors, tailors, wallers, and hawkers of secondhand goods. He circumvents the charted world of international merchants and bankers to consider the lineaments of the retail trade, in which credit, payment in kind (barter), and petty lending were perfectly routine. Interest rates of 10 to 30 percent prevailed; pawn taking was common; and customers' debts might be carried in account books for months. Relying on local bankers and brokers, retailers often drew on a line of credit to enable them suddenly to acquire supplies in bulk. Cheeses and salted fish came from as far away as Sardinia and Dubrovnik, but, interestingly, none of the author's retailers sold vegetables, which came mostly from local garden plots.

In Prato's world of petty shopkeeping, independent women operators were usually widows; they surfaced in the record for limited periods. Moreover, women constituted a mere 10 percent of retailers' customers. Some feminists will dislike these findings.

Names, quantities, specific prices, purchase and payment dates, and concrete brokerage operations all give substance and color to Marshall's wise and resonant study. Surprisingly, shops were frequently open on Sundays and even Christmas. Contrary to early guild rules, shopkeepers often extended credit, and though barter was common, the author found no cases in which luxuries, such as cloaks or silver buttons, were traded for goods or labor.

How to use this book for interdisciplinary study is not readily evident, unless, moving over the subsoil of daily business conduct and expectation, we speak of a system of strong pragmatic values in which the mighty florin was king and bankruptcy dishonor and sin. The "arithmetic order" (rigorous accounting procedures) of the Tuscans may touch the "cultural foundations" of the "taste for the geometrical organization of space" in the "Florentine art of the Renaissance" (xiv). But this old neo-Marxist notion is dubious on many grounds, not least because Marshall's tradesmen employed neither arabic numerals nor double-entry bookkeeping in their ledgers, despite their use in Italy ever since the early fourteenth century.

More striking, instead, is the fact that concealed interest on small loans and on some credit sales made for regular income, despite the Church's well-known strictures against such practice. Moreover, few "usurers" made death-bed confessions of ill-gotten gains. How then did shopkeepers square the taking of interest with conscience? Most historians probably take for granted the force-majeure argument that by doing what everyone else was doing, merchants were simply dismissing Church doctrine as inconsequential. Maybe so, but the point needs to be argued, since it is a claim about the nature and balance of religious belief in early-Renaissance Italy.

Lauro Martines
University of California, Los Angeles

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