Daily Life in Renaissance Italy (review)

Clearly written as a textbook for undergraduates in renaissance survey classes, this volume fits that niche well and also offers a suggestive overview of the current state of scholarship on everyday life in renaissance Italy. Although the authors define the renaissance as a period stretching from the mid-14^th to the mid to late 16^th century, they focus on the period 1400 to 1600 with a decided lean towards the 16^th century. And although they rightly point out that the urban orientation of renaissance society and culture masks the fact that most people still lived and worked in a rural setting, and make regular excursions into the countryside to describe daily life there, the nature and extent of the available scholarship means that by far the greater part of their discussion is concerned with life in the major urban centers of Rome, Florence and Venice. In fact, one of the pluses of the book is the attention given to the often less considered city of Rome, a reflection of the authors’ impressive archival research and publication on that city.

One of the most notable things about this volume is that the authors have conceived of daily life in a broader way than usual. Daily life here is not simply the material culture of the period, but rather a rich landscape of complexity and difference that interrelates in suggestive ways the material and the spiritual, the individual and the group, the high and the low. Agency, danger, fear, negotiation, friendship, love, self-fashioning and role playing, spiritual aspirations and conflicting moral codes all interrelate with pots, pans, houses, food, clothing, disease, life cycles, time and space, as well as the classic issues of class, gender and power, both governmental and informal—a complex tapestry, and a fascinating one, that the Cohens do a fine job of making clear and multifaceted at the same time.

There are several aspects of this book that seem particularly well done. First, the authors nicely convey the complexity and richness of everyday life in the renaissance. Students who tend to think with a hubris (that perhaps reflects a more general view) that our society is the most complex and rich in history and that earlier people lived simpler, more primitive, almost childlike lives will find those stereotypes well challenged. The everyday world the Cohens portray and explain with its intricate negotiations and strategies; its unfamiliar dangers and its many techniques for survival, building solidarities and security; not to mention its competitions for power and status; or its ways of playing and finding pleasure, offers students an opportunity to rethink their (and our) hubris about living richer, more complex lives at the end of history.

In addition the authors tackle perhaps one of the most pervasive myths of our historiographical tradition: the faith that government is the ultimate source of power and thus the first and most important thing one should study when trying to understand the past. For the Cohens government was merely one competitor among many for power in daily life and it was neither a very well organized nor a very effective one. Instead they place informal social controls before government—honor, status evaluation, customary and Christian moral codes and gossip—and focus on more local institutions like family, neighborhood and confraternities as the key solidarities upon which most significant power was based in daily life. And in the complex negotiations between these more local and informal organizations of power, they find telling space for the play of agency in everyday life—suggestively escaping the determinism of much cultural and social history.

And nicely they do this all with a theoretical sophistication that is well hidden and a prose that is lively, even witty at times, and jargon free. In fact, the authors are able to speak to students in a clear, familiar way without seeming to patronize. Occasionally perhaps a technical term from renaissance history slips in unexplained, but rarely. Impressively, however, issues like agency, self fashioning...