.
* I am particularly grateful to the editors of this volume, and to Paula E. Findlen, Michelle M. Fontaine and Paul F. Gehl for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I would like to acknowledge the courtesy of the Archivio di Stato, Milano (Figures 1-4) for photographs.
1 and P. Simons eds., Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, Oxford, 1987, p. 1-61 ; A. Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence, Cambridge-Massachusetts-London, 1994 ; D. Romano, Patricians and Popolani : The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State, Baltimore-London, 1987, ch. 4 ; Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, New York, 1982, ch. 1.
2 See, for example, L. Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists,
Princeton, 1963, p. 3-84 ; G. Brucker ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence : the Diaries of Buonacorso Pitti Datti and Gregorio Datti (Prospect Heights, 1981) ; R. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence : A Study of Four Families,
Princeton (N. J.), 1968.
See especially G. Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, Berkeley, 1986; F. W. Kent MEFRIM – 115 – 2003 – 1, p. 107-122.
KEVIN M. STEVENS
SIBLING RIVALRY
HONOR, AMBITION, AND IDENTITY IN THE PRINTING TRADE IN EARLY MODERN MILAN* In the last twenty-five years, scholars of early modern Italy have shown that the complexity of Renaissance business can only be understood in the larger context of social networks between artisans, craftsmen and professionals at all levels. Directly refuting Jacob Burckhardt’s notion of Renaissance individualism, urban and social historians now emphasize the corporate, multidimensional nature of economic exchange in which patronage, friendship and kinship ties, personal honor and reputation were at the heart of entrepreneurship1. Noble clansmen, patricians, and highly prosperous merchant families have left us eloquent accounts of their attitudes toward business, primarily in diaries, letters, family chronicles, domestic handbooks and the like2. The notoriously low survival rate of these sources among lesser artisans and merchants, who were parsimonious in their use of written language, complicates the task of
