The Renaissance-era citizens of the Italian city of Prato had a particularly zealous practice that is about to help today’s historians open a remarkable window on to their lives. The upper classes of this satellite city to Florence were diligent account keepers, a trait that seems at once prosaic and modern.
It is what you might expect of a social stratum comprising mostly textile merchants, except their dedication to ‘the books’ went beyond toting figures.
“They started to insert reflections on what was happening at the time,” explains Associate Professor Peter Howard, a Florentine historian. “Conscious of mortality, they also often included instructions for sons so that the experience of a generation was not lost.”
Associate Professor Howard is inaugural director of the recently established Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, and convenor of the international Prato Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
The personal and business accounts from Prato, together with records of municipal statutes and deliberations, are stored in Italy’s state archives and are about to become the focus of coordinated international study – a collaboration with the Archivio di Stato di Prato, Medieval and Renaissance academics from Monash, and experts from partner institutions in the Prato Consortium.
The treasures to be examined for their unique perspective on Tuscan life in the 15th and 16th centuries include the papers of Francesco Datini, the famous ‘merchant of Prato'. A translation of the letters that he received from his wife, Margherita, have recently been published by Monash scholar Dr Carolyn James in collaboration with La Trobe University's Dr Antonio Pagliaro.
Prato’s appeal flows from its direct connections to Florence, says Associate Professor Howard. The smaller city supplied textiles and raw materials to its great neighbour for the production of luxury goods and finished products during the Renaissance, and in fact only separated from Florence in the 1990s. The famed Medici family were strong in Prato, their patronage and odes to magnificence visible still in buildings such as the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri.
The Prato Consortium was forged by the late Professor Bill Kent, expert on Lorenzo de’ Medici, member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and editor of an international collaborative project developing a 20-volume set of letters by the man many called ‘Lorenzo the Magnificent’ (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Professor Kent was also founding Director of the Monash Prato Centre. The consortium brings together Medieval and Renaissance specialists from Warwick University in the UK, the University of Toronto, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, also in Toronto, Arizona State University, Durham University and the University of Edinburgh, along with the Archivio di Stato di Prato. Its purpose is to find collaborative research strengths, and to build opportunities for graduate students.
One of the consortium’s proposed research streams combines the three themes of poverty, piety and charity in Renaissance Italy. Drawing on virtually untouched records from the Prato archive, the project will focus on charitable institutions such as hospitals and church fraternities, and on the role of religion in the community.
“This offers the possibility of understanding the complex development of society and culture in the shadow of Florence, a major centre,” Associate Professor Howard says.
From the pulpit
He describes the scope of materials in the Prato archives as a “goldmine”, creating new questions and new methods of understanding the material and cultural development of Renaissance Florence and Prato by focusing on rapidly evolving religious contexts.
His particular work concentrates on Renaissance preachers. “It is important to understand that, at the time, sermons, preachers, and the pulpit were at the centre of society, rather like a modern day news service.” A somewhat under-utilised resource in the past, sermon studies is now one of the most dynamic and revealing fields in Renaissance research, and Associate Professor Howard is one of the researchers at the forefront.
Only a few preachers are widely remembered today – Girolamo Savonarola and Saint Bernardino of Siena among them – usually because they promoted incendiary ideas, or had sermons published in their own time. But preacher influence was manifold; in the Tuscan city of Siena, sermons were even translated into laws.
Assisted by funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), Associate Professor Howard is examining the key preachers of each decade in the 15th century, research that is starting to appear in articles, and which will form the basis of a book to be published at the project’s conclusion.
Among the significant messages disseminated by preachers was the Renaissance tenet of magnificence: “There was a new awareness, and language of appreciation, of space and buildings,” Associate Professor Howard says. “And that was not just aesthetic, but also linked as a moral value to citizens' rights. And once you made that link, you were, literally, creating a heaven on earth.”
And contrary to the idea that the average citizen simply absorbed the ideas of these learned men, he says that preachers often disseminated ideas plucked from the grass roots: “Preachers had their ear to the ground. They talked to citizens, went into the spaces where they were constructing, what could be termed, local theologies.”
At the heart, a library
The establishment of the Monash Prato Centre in the Palazzo Vaj in 2001 was a natural building block for Monash University’s expertise in Medieval and Renaissance studies, a field that may at first seem counter-intuitive for an antipodean university. But the presence of luminaries such as Professor Bill Kent and Professor Louis Green (a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities whose classic first monograph was recently republished in paperback by Cambridge University Press) set a high standard for history at Monash from its earliest decades.
Now Professor Kent, who passed away in 2010, has been commemorated with the establishment of the Bill Kent Library, a space filled with 2000 volumes (purchased from the Warburg Institute in London) that is the beating heart of Medieval and Renaissance studies at the Prato Centre.
This library has joined the powerful IRIS consortium of Florentine humanities libraries, which also includes Harvard’s Berenson Library and the Uffizi Library. Its cataloguing reveals that about a fifth of its books are new to the network.
Because of this library, Monash graduate students in Medieval and Renaissance studies will have a dedicated home space in Italy in which to learn tools such as palaeography – the skill of deciphering obscure shorthands used by authors as a way to conserve paper. Such tools are vital if new generations of scholars are to dip into the deep resources of the Prato archives. To support this work, the Bill Kent Foundation Fund was established in mid-2010. It has a broad mandate to support the development and maintenance of the library and to seek funding for conferences, scholarships and fellowships in the field.
“Bill’s and subsequent generations of Australian scholars in this field were hosted by overseas institutes, such as Harvard’s Villa i Tatti. There was no base overseas. So the Monash space in Europe is quite special.”
Associate Professor Howard’s book, Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence, will be published by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto later this year.
