The Merchant of Prato’s Wife: Margherita Datini and Her World, 1360–1423 by Ann Crabb (review)

Margherita Bandini Datini may be familiar to many scholars and students of the Renaissance as the wife of Francesco Datini, a Pratese trader who earned the title of “The Merchant of Prato” in Iris Origo’s 1957 book of the same name. More than a driven businessman, Datini has been essential to historians of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century trade because of his voluminous record-keeping, records still preserved to this day at the Archivio di Stato in Prato and at Datini Online. Scholars including Origo and those who have followed her have recognized that Margherita was an essential cog in the Datini mercantile machine, but Ann Crabb’s detailed study is the first monographic treatment of her. Focusing largely on the 425 letters exchanged between husband and wife over a period of twenty-five years, Crabb follows Margherita from her marriage to Francesco in Avignon to the couple’s return to Italy six years later, and their subsequent movements between Prato, Florence, Pisa, and Bologna. Crabb reveals Margherita to be not merely Francesco’s wife, but one of his most essential managers, caring not only for his houses in Florence and Prato, his illegitimate daughter and her niece, but also for his business interests in his absence.

Margherita’s duties as “deputy husband” (198) were wide-ranging. They included traditional women’s work: managing the house, its material comforts and the servants who worked there, caring for family health and spiritual well-being, and entertaining his guests. Crabb’s description of Margherita’s domestic duties reminds us, yet again, how complex and wide-ranging were the duties of a wealthy Renaissance housewife. However, in Margherita’s case, her husband’s regular absences and the trust he placed in her meant she did much more, extending the “private” sphere of female activity well beyond traditional expectations, as when she informs him, “I have written to Barzalone that he should do what you tell him. Do as seems best to you and you cannot err” (73). Crabb stresses that Datini treated his wife as an equal of his male assistants. Margherita managed his accounts and loans, received goods and gave payments, and used her political connections to assist with her husband’s political difficulties. Although she often employed the topos of female weakness in her letters, Crabb’s presentation of Margherita makes clear that she was both capable and eager to demonstrate herself as a manager.

Nowhere is Margherita’s capacity for management more evident than in her correspondence. On his frequent travels, Francesco received detailed updates from Margherita, who also regularly corresponded with relatives, friends, and business associates, and employees. Crabb is a longtime student of female correspondence, and so not surprisingly her treatment of Margherita’s letter-writing is one of the highlights of this work. Here and elsewhere Crabb has demonstrated that female illiteracy or partial literacy did not mean women were not active correspondents: many, including Margherita on occasion, used scribes for ease, convenience, or to demonstrate status. However, Margherita wanted to be literate, and dedicated herself to learning both writing and reading in the 1390s, both to avoid relying on scribes for personal letters to Francesco and “to participate more usefully in merchant activities, as part of the job she took seriously, that of merchant’s wife” (139). She also sought honor, by which Crabb means not the typical conservation of chastity, but “the nonsexual definition of honor, that is, doing her job well” (54). Chapter ten is an excellent case study of female literacy, demonstrating that for women and men, achieving what we understand as literacy was a complex and often lengthy process.

Crabb speculates that Margherita’s zeal for honor in her work assisting Francesco was in part compensation for her failure to do the one duty required of all wives according to the prescriptive literature of the day: produce...