The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence.

Rainey, Ronald

Paul D. McLean. The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. xvi + 288 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $22.95. ISBN: 978-08223-4117-8.

Historians might find it difficult getting into this sociological study of networking, and especially so through the first chapter, which catalogs recent work by sociologists on the topics of interpersonal relationships and network formation. There are rewards, however, for those who persevere. The concept of applying contemporary sociological theory to an examination of historical documents--in this case about 1,100 letters written by Florentines of the Trecento and Quattrocento to current or prospective patrons asking for favors, jobs or tax relife--is certainly of interest to any historian open to the learning opportunities provided by interdisciplinarity. Historians have some reason, however, to be skeptical about the historical relevance of some of the findings. To discover, for example, that Renaissance Florentine letter writers of low status sometimes wrote in "intimate terms" to higher-status addressees when seeking favors (128) is rather counterintuitive, and an abundance of evidence is provided to assure us that such intimacy in letter construction generally required a greater degree of "social structural proximity." But to assert that "this intimacy across social distance is endemic to the performative part of clientelism" based on similar findings of sociologists who studied patronage systems in contemporary Peru (Stokes) and Argentina (Auyero) seems to require a greater faith in the ability of social scientists to identify "universals" than some readers may be willing to accept. Tables are provided to indicate the frequency of particular words used in these letters to patrons (such as onore and amicizia), and the extensive commentary on the use of such words is entertaining to read and often enlightening, but the mass of detail sometimes gets in the way of common sense: for example, when the author asserts that many petitioners framed their requests for help from patrons "in terms of amicizia" but also found it necessary at times "to offer some objective reasons that favor should be extended" (161), he seems to be pointing out a decidedly obvious recipe for success.

The most valuable aspect of this book is the presentation of the letters themselves and the author's meticulous analysis of them, creating in the collectivity of his analyses something of a Renaissance how-to manual for the writing of letters begging for consideration and advancement. A reader with more antiquarian interests (like myself) enjoyed reading the letters and would have welcomed the presentation of even more letters and fewer tables, for the great value of this study is in reading the words rather than counting them. But the author had another purpose in mind and found it useful to discover how often certain words were used in the letters, since "no previous study has made a substantial effort to document the language and codes of this 'epistolary production" (91) and to pose the question (which is the title of chapter 4) "what gets said when in patronage letters?"

All the counting allowed for the creation of charts and so table 3, for example, demonstrates that words such as onore and servidore appear rather often in letters seeking offices, while words such as virtu and affezione rarely occur in such contexts. Table 4 shows the average incidence of selected keywords by decade for all types of letters, and here we see that the word onore appears in more than half of all letters written during the decade 1400-09 but in only 21% of all letters written during the decade 1480-89, leading the author to conclude that the term onore "was clearly used less frequently by favor seekers over time" and, instead, the authors of letters in the later period stressed their affection, service, obligation, and loyalty to their patrons (106-07). The word virtu, that hallmark of Renaissance humanism, apparently appeared so seldom that it is not even one of the selected keywords included in table 4, although a spectacular letter of 1421 uses the word virtu twice, in just the way we might expect, as well as referring to the retention of honor (133), allowing the author in his conclusion (227) to suggest that "high cultural representations may be scarce in everyday interaction--as is, for example, the language of virtu in Florence" and prompting this reader to wonder if writing letters to important patrons can really be included among daily activities.

Professor McLean's ultimate purpose is to "articulate a sociology of culture that keeps both strategic and constitutive aspects in focus" (226) and he adds these Renaissance Florentine patronage letters to his toolkit in studying the formation of networks and the interactivity of the networkers. While the author sees this study as just the beginning of a larger enterprise, he does reach some dramatic conclusions about the usefulness of these patronage letters in the study of self-presentation and self-description, topics of great interest to Renaissance social historians ever since Burkhardt celebrated the rise of the individual in Renaissance Florence. When McLean argues in his conclusion, for example, that the shift in the framing of the office-seeking patronage letters "from one dominant framing (honor) to another (servanthood) over a period of fifty years" during the fifteenth century provides evidence of a new "presentation of self" by these letters writer (227), I wonder if he is reading too much into the changes in word usage. Letters followed formulas during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as the author himself points out, and they still do--in fact, McLean provides an interesting example of contemporary letter formulas for job seekers available on the Internet--and formulas go in and out of fashion, particularly in times of dynamic changes such as the periods under review here. Are some of the vocabulary shifts that McLean documents more attributable to formula variations than to changing mentalite? This study raises some large questions and one hopes to find the answers in these letters, but McLean will need to apply sociological theory to a wider variety of Renaissance sources, not just patronage letters, before major conclusions can be reached. In this work, the letters themselves are more compelling than the author's conclusions.

RONALD RAINEY

New York University