Merchant culture in fourteenth-century Venice: the Zibaldone da Canal (review)

134 Reviews Dotson, John E., trans., Merchant culture in fourteenth-century Venice: the Zibaldone da Canal (Medieval & Renaissance texts & studies, Vol. 98), Binghamton, Medieval & Renaissance texts & studies, 1994; cloth; pp. xii, 228; 2 plates, 1 map, 22 figures; R.R.P. US$25.00 John Dotson's translation, with introduction and notes, of the Zibaldone da Canal is welcome for two reasons. Thefirstis simply that for thefirsttime we now have an English translation of at least one of the extant merchant manuals from later medieval Italy. It is almost incomprehensible that this has so far been the case and that texts such as the La pratica della mercatura of Francesco di Balducci Pegolotti have remained untranslated, and therefore unaccessible to Anglophile students. For teachers of medieval economic history, the appearance of Dotson's translation should be welcomed as eagerly as was Lopez and Miskimin's translation of a variety of documents relating to economic life in the Mediterranean world in Medieval trade in the Mediterranean world in 1955. The second is that, by reading Dotson's translation side by side with the original in the edition by Alfredo Stussi (Zibaldone da Canal: manoscritto mercantile del secolo XIV [Venice, 1967]), one can actually teach oneself to read the idiosyncratic late-medieval Venetian vernacular dialect in which so many important texts are written. 'Zibaldone' meant a 'Notebook'. Thetext,which now survives in a unique manuscript in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, is a collection of notes on various subjects taken down by an unknown Venetian merchant early in the fourteenth century: a 'Commonplace Book'. The attribution 'da Canal' derives from its ownership by Niccold da Canal in the earlyfifteenthcentury and its possession in the famous D a Canal family of Venice until the eighteenth century. In ah probability, it was originally compiled by an earlier member of the family and was later transcribed into the 'fair copy' that we have today. The manuscript is missing at least several pages at the beginning, but, as we have it, consists of nine major parts: (1) various information on matters mercantile, including simple arithmetical problems, (2) a memorandum of formulae for converting weights and measures and currencies between various places and Venice, (3) a fragment of the Tristan story of King Milliadus (Rivalen), (4) the characteristics of spices, (5) division of the parts of the day, (6) miscellaneous medical information, (7) a brief chronicle of Venice to 1303, (8) two sirventes: 'The precepts of Reviews 135 Solomon* (known elsewhere as the 'Doctrine of the slave of Bari') and "The God of love', (9) various prayers and charms. On the one hand these various subjects are not arranged systematically. Some of them are scattered around the text. O n the other, the text as w e have it is clearly a fair copy written throughout in a neat chancery Gothic script. From analysis of the paper, water marks, script, and language, the manuscript has been dated to the late fourteenth century. However, analysis of the material, particularly the information on weights, measures, and coinages, suggests a composition date of around 1320. The last date mentioned in the brief chronicle is 1303 and the 'Memorandum' on conversion of weights, measures, and coinages of other countries to those of Venice is headed '1311, 20 August'. Some material goes back to the thirteenth century and was already anachronistic when the notebook was originally compiled; for example, there is information on weights, measures, and coinages of cities such as Lattakiah, Tortosa, and Acre, some reported in the past tense, indicating that it was compiled after the fall of the Crusader states (1291 A.D.) and was recorded purely out of interest. The question which remains unanswered, both in the Stussi edition and also by Dotson, is: why would someone at the end of the fourteenth century want to have transcribed into a fair copy a random collection of notes and jottings, much of which would have been long outdated? And, given that he did, why was the material not reordered systematically? The answers probably lay in the lost opening pages and wUl never be known. A guess might be that the notebook was originally compiled by a...