Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto.

Ambrosini, Federica

James S. Grubb. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xvii + 344 pp. ISBN 0-8018-5321- 4. $45.

This book fills a gap, dealing as it does with a subject which up to now had failed to draw scholars' attention: that is, the way of life of families of "the middling sort . . . neither powerful nor powerless" (xiii) in the Veneto of the Quattrocento. Unexpected is also the main (though by no means unique) source on which the author has based his research, family chronicles, a genre that was not thought to have been cultivated outside Tuscany; a critical edition of the Veronese and Vicentine memoirs is being prepared by James S.Grubb and Gian Maria Varanini.

The miscellaneous character of the information provided by Veneto memorialists throws light on various aspects of their outer as well as their inner life: we have in fact every reason, as the author remarks, to believe in their sincerity. Exogamous marriage was a means of creating or sealing between families new and hitherto little studied relationships, apparently close and strong to the point that in-laws were not seldom preferred to agnates by testators without direct issue; dowries, which inflated during the century, were protected by legislators, widows were encouraged not to remarry and often granted guardianship of children. The Quattrocento was an age of growing fertility and of demographic resurgence, and the birth of a child created another and very peculiar kind of bond: that between family and godparents, usually chosen by the child's parents among their social superiors or inferiors. But family itself was, in fifteenth-century Veneto, a composite and shifting body that could include illegitimate children, stray relatives, and servants. On the condition of servants the sources offer mixed evidence: it was not unusual for them to be exploited or mistreated, but there is also evidence that employers appreciated and rewarded faithful service.

Commerce took place mostly on a small scale, limited to a regional sphere. Besides acting often as legal agents, procurators or tax collectors for Church and commune, or being members of the local college of notaries, memorialists such as the Arnaldi of Vicenza would trade in cloth, in silk and, especially later in the century, in agricultural goods. A chronic shortage of liquidity characterized the Veneto economy as an economy of debts. In the country, though, indebted tenants could rely on the support of the Venetian government, on a legal system whose loopholes they well knew how to exploit, on emphyteutic contracts (which hindered change and improvement in agriculture) and not least on the landowners' wish to keep good relations with cultivators. Owners of ready money - an example is again provided by the Arnaldi - could sometimes act as moneylenders, but these loans were usually disguised as sales of land. Loan default, rather than purchase, was a very common way of acquiring land. And ownership of land came to be preferred to commerce, at least to those trades that could be deemed "manual" or "vile arts," by those who aimed at qualifying for nobility: a much sought after status that was also extremely difficult to define, the only generally accepted criterion being fama.

Much attention is devoted by the author to spirituality and attitudes to religion. Veneto memoirs and testaments testify to a devotion that, though deeply felt, was "on the whole, pragmatic and optimistic" (188); far from being ill disposed to the clergy, the laity were nevertheless remarkably autonomous in their spiritual behaviors.

James S. Grubb has worked, on his own admission, in an empirical way, resorting to systematic comparisons between the Veneto and other Italian and European environments; in Italy, Venice and Florence with some lesser Tuscan centers are most frequently taken into account. The result, thanks also to the deliberate choice of a plain, clear language, is outstanding. It is to be believed that this cross-section of provincial life will indeed, as Grubb hopes, "somehow contribute to a larger discussion" (220).

FEDERICA AMBROSlNI University of Padova