Florentine household accounts, fourteenth to seventeenth centuries

Abstract

AbstractThis article calls attention to the personal accounts kept by Florentines for their private affairs. Well over a thousand of these documents survive from the late fourteenth century onwards, and they constitute a source that for the early period probably has no equal for any other city in Europe. Kept according to the highest standards of accounting practice at the time, these accounts document the personal activity of Florentines in the marketplace outside the sphere of their business interests, an area barely adumbrated in the literature on the economic and social history of the city. Of the several functions this activity served, this article concentrates exclusively on just one: the household economy. It explores this subject through a survey of several hundred such accounts with the objective of bringing this source into the extensive literature in Florentine studies on the family, material culture and the economy in general. The discussion emphasizes the importance of change across time and touches on the wider issue of the cultural significance of the accounting practice that brought these documents into existence.