The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Origo, Iris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241293928 ISBN 13: 9780241293928

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2017

Synopsis

This extraordinary re-creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is one of the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century.

Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, it reveals to us a shrewd, enterprising, anxious man, as he makes deals, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife and broods on his legacy. It is an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany.

'Datini has now probably become most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages ... brilliant and intricate' The Times

'As a picture of Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron' Sunday Times

About this title

Review:

Francesco di Marco Datini, the fourteenth-century Tuscan merchant who forms the subject of Origo's brilliant study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figures of the later Middle Ages ... paints, in brilliant and intricate detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance (The Times)

As a picture of the daily round in Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron (Sunday Times)

From the Back Cover:

'In his ambition, shrewdness, tenacity, anxiety and greed, he is a forerunner of the businessmen of today'

This extraordinary re-creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is one of the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century. Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, it reveals to us a tough, enterprising, anxious man, as he makes deals, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife and broods on his legacy. It is an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany.

'Datini has now probably become most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages ... brilliant and intricate' The Times

'As a picture of Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron' Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0241293928
• ISBN 13: 9780241293928
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400