Ann Crabb. The Merchant of Prato’s Wife

The surviving correspondence of Francesco di Marco Datini (1335–1410) of Prato has been the source of myriad insights into the late medieval economy and business practices. The thousands of letters to and from Francesco were also the basis on which Iris Origo cast her biographical study, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (1957). Ann Crabb has concentrated her efforts on reading the 244 letters to Francesco from his wife, Margherita Bandini, and the 181 he sent her, written between 1385 and 1410, though the bulk of them hail from 1394 to 1398. Crabb deliberately chooses a title that capitalizes on Origo’s by reversing the title and subtitle to give greater weight to Margherita’s individuality, “because Margherita herself believed that she had an important job to perform as a wife” (1). Indeed, perhaps the foremost conclusion Crabb draws from the epistolary evidence is that “wives had their own independent, although subordinate, sphere, which could give the wife a sense of importance, distinct from the state of relations with the husband” (199).

Art · Humanities · Linguistics · Subtitle · Theology · Wife · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies