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Reviewed by:
  • Florence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630
  • Laurie Nussdorfer
Florence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630. By R. Burr Litchfield (New York, ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008) Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90034

If ever there were a book ideally suited to appear in a digital edition, it is this magisterial study of the social geography of Florence in the first century of the Medici grand dukes. It is no coincidence that it is Litchfield’s work. Litchfield has been on the cutting edge of the use of new technology in social history since the 1960s, and he was early alert to the possibilities of the digital revolution. While shedding light on the urban population that gave birth to the Renaissance, the book uses post-Renaissance sources to chronicle its momentous transformation from a republican citizenry into ducal subjects. The process by which a courtly culture supplanted the rich civic traditions of Florence has broad implications for students of regime change in any period, but Litchfield deepens the political story by attaching it to demographic, social, and economic shifts. He presents the history of a community that became a ducal capital, not just how a new princely family acquired power.

Even more significant, however, is the manner in which Litchfield tells his tale—a series of population maps and commentaries that analyze several state censuses from 1551, 1561, and 1632. These sources mainly count heads of households, often providing specific occupations and locations, as well as rent assessments, for a city of 59,000 inhabitants (growing to 66,000 in 1632). Computerized databases were obviously essential to ordering such a massive number of households, but Litchfield wanted not only to classify but also to locate these units and to show how the residential patterns of specific social groups and occupations changed between 1530 and 1630. For this purpose, he had to design a methodology [End Page 294] for reading urban space socially and to give it visual form. Although the wealth of knowledge already available about the Florentines ultimately determined how he would discriminate, for example, between rich and poor or urban center and periphery, he also employed statistical factor analysis to good effect and developed an online gazetteer to sixteenth-century Florence.

The E-Book format partners brilliantly with Litchfield’s online gazetteer. This magnificent resource is a grid of eighty-seven squares imposed on a 1584 map of Florence; each square is interactive and provides a map detail with descriptions of major monuments and a brief social survey of households. When the author mentions a particular street or building, the reader can simply click on the grid square referenced, see it within the context of the whole urban map, and, if she wishes, go more deeply into the map detail and social description.

The Florentine case teaches us that residential patterns are resilient and that economic factors may be just as influential as political ones in reshaping cities. The book’s real value, however, is to provide a model for how to analyze and visualize a society in transition. As such, Litchfield’s example will hopefully inspire similar studies of other urban communities and ultimately foster a genuinely comparative history of urban change.

Laurie Nussdorfer
Wesleyan University
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