Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c.1100–c.1440, by Dennis Romano

It is rare that one sees a work of economic history as beautifully produced as Dennis Romano’s new book. With one hundred images interspersed through the text—many full-page and thirty in colour—the reader comes face to face with not only cheesemongers, goldsmiths and moneylenders, but such characters as a buyer assessing the fitness of a horse, a tailor fitting garments in the street before his shop, and women carrying produce to market. The commercial life of later medieval Italy springs to life in the vivid hues characteristic of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian illumination. All the more credit to the author, then, for a monograph as vivid and compelling as its accompanying imagery, beginning with a sermon by San Bernardino of Siena comparing Christ to a merchant selling goods from a shop (‘with five tall windows ... that spew forth the fire of love’, p. 1). Romano’s subject is the markets and marketplaces of later medieval Italy, which he convincingly frames as one of the three pillars of medieval Italian urban life—state, church and economy, symbolised respectively by the civic features of the town hall, the duomo and the marketplace.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Clothing · Face (sociological concept) · Fifteenth · Middle Ages · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · Classics · Computer Science · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · History · Medieval Literature and History