Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600 by Evelyn Welch (review)

REVIEWS 303 movements and resettlement of population, including Vlakhs, by Hungarian kings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Explanations for this exodus like the one Vásáry provides, namely that “Vlakh groups flocked to medieval Hungary from the Balkans, attracted by the possibility of a lighter tax burden and other favourable conditions” (157), are not supported by any representative statistical data (what was the tax burden south of the Danube?) and suggest a demographic growth of the Romanian population in the next centuries that simply defies logic. Vásáry is reviving obsolete approaches to the ethnic and demographic history of the region by accepting the positivist interpretation that large events like battles and conquests necessarily predate ethnic changes. Thus, the large-scale colonization of the lands east of the Carpathians (the future Moldavia) can only postdate the victorious expedition of Louis I against the Tatars, who had to relinquish their control of the region and allow immigration (156), while the Vlakh domination of Wallachia must necessarily have been the consequence of the post-1242 Hungarian creation of the Banate of Severin. It seems that Vásáry’s self-limiting approach to studying the Cuman and Tatar presence along the Lower Danube was dictated not so much by his desire to exemplify the state of “feudal anarchy” in the Balkans, but to support his unlikely claim that no Vlakh population whatsoever lived north of the Balkans before the thirteenth century. Such a claim can be maintained only when one deliberately chooses to use nothing but narrative sources and draw conclusions from the inevitably rigid labeling policy of medieval authors. Thus, since in the thirteenth century the future Wallachia was referred to as Cumania in the Latin sources (Vásáry himself admits that Greek sources use the toponym of Koumania only three times, cf. 137), we are expected to conclude that only Cumans lived in the area. One suspects that the author’s unwillingness to provide any theoretical considerations of the social and economic contacts between nomads and sedentary population was a deliberate choice to bring the discussion of the ethnic history of present-day Romania to where it was during the interwar period . Considering Vásáry’s attacks on long-dead Bulgarian and Romanian nationalist historians, one feels that this book would have found its proper audience sixty years ago. At present, it creates a feeling of national prejudice. BORIS TODOROV, History, UCLA Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2005) 403 pp., ill. Evelyn Welch’s Shopping in the Renaissance is a vivid, fascinating, and welldocumented account of shopping practices in early modern Italy. Drawing on a wide array of sources ranging from visual and literary representations of marketplaces to notarial contracts, family records, and account books, Welch maps out the spatiotemporal, political, legal, and moral frameworks that defined market activity. Welch notes that, on the one hand, the variety of commodities, services , and forms of acquisition expanded the definition of what constituted a marketable product and allowed for a more widespread circulation of goods. On the other, this same flexibility constituted at the same time a source of anxiety , exposing the volatility of the boundaries that defined class and gender roles outside the marketplace. Welch’s approach addresses both aspects of the mar- REVIEWS 304 ket as a meeting ground with permeable boundaries, which downplayed class, gender, and religious divisions in favor of a common desire for commercial profit and acquisition of goods, and also a battleground for conflicting religious, commercial, and political interests. Part 1 of the book, “Seeing Shopping,” focuses on early Modern perceptions of the Italian marketplace as a twin metaphor of fecundity and moral corruption. In chapter 2, “Markets and Metaphors,” Welch discusses the social, political, and moral significations attached to the marketplace, by examining fourteenthto sixteenth-century written and visual representations of its participants and their interaction, which range from positive images of fecundity and social stability to negative views associating the market with sensuality, disease, and materialism. These stereotypical concepts can be traced back to early fourteenth -century representations, such as the fresco cycle in the...