Merchant Writers – Florentine Memoirs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Merchant WritersFlorentine Memoirs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance\nAuthor(s): Vittore Branca, Murtha Baca, Massimo Ciavolella/Luigi Ballerini\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Toronto Press, Canada\nImprint: University of Toronto Press\nISBN-13: 9781442637146, 978-1442637146\nSynopsis\nThe birthplace of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and the powerful Medici family, Florence was also the first great banking and commercial centre of continental Europe. The citys middle-class merchants, though lacking the literary virtuosity of its most famous sons, were no less prolific as writers of account books, memoirs, and diaries. Written by ordinary men, these first-hand accounts of commercial life recorded the everyday realities of their businesses, families, and personal lives alongside the high drama of shipwrecks, plagues, and political conspiracies.\n\n Published in Italian in 1986, Vittore Brancas collection of these accounts established the importance of the genre to the study o.