Paper -a:
Women were an integral part of the commercial life of early 14th-century Florence. They were active in local markets, hawking wares inside and outside of the city, in shops, transient stalls, or along roadsides. They were guild participants, if not full members, and were the subject of communal legislation that treated their work on an equal basis with males. They worked with their husbands, families, or independently. Women operated in the world of everyday necessities, not the higher circles of finance or cloth finishing. Despite views of certain contemporary writers (and some modern scholars), women worked in honorable trades that were fundamental to the needs of the growing Florentine community. This paper adds to current studies of working women in medieval Europe and particularly Tuscany.
Paper -b:
This paper reconsiders the contemporary reputation of the Trecento artist Giotto di Bondone and proposes that his entrepreneurial skills may have contributed to his unusual social status. Between 1315 and 1337 Giotto involved his large family in a range of commercial transactions in the rural Mugello which showed him to be a man of ambition and not averse to money making. At the same time he was undertaking commissions on behalf of the wealthy banking and mercantile families in Florence. Through new interpretations of archival evidence and selected works it will be argued that Giotto's mercantile mentality enabled him to engage successfully and pragmatically with contemporary debates on the merits of poverty and wealth on behalf of his patrons.
Paper -c:
In my paper I will examine transcultural entanglements between South German and particularly Florentine mercantile diasporas. The practice of transalpine trade caused processes of transfer of information, knowledge, and technology between merchant bankers from various nationes. I will concentrate on networks of learning and improving skills requested for commerce and banking. Beside this the everyday relations between merchant bankers resident in Lyon or Bruges and the exchange of cultural goods will be discussed.
Paper -d:
The citizens of Siena gave so generously to the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala that it could purchase large tracts of land and precious relics. The benefit of these gifts was then returned to the Sienese: bread produced from the granges was distributed to the needy and the relics were displayed for the welfare of all citizens on the feast of the Annunciation. This paper explores the 15th-century decorative programs of both the hospital and the baptistery of Siena, and argues that this imagery exhorted the Sienese to perform charitable works and explores the degree to which charity formed part of Siena's civic ideology.
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