Insegna Studi Mediterranei all?Istituto Universitario Europeo di Fiesole; è stato fellow di Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies a Firenze) e Visiting Professor all?Università degli Studi di Firenze e all?Università di Atene. Ha pubblicato Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance e Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (ambedue presso la Harvard University Press). Con Franek Sznura ha curato l?edizione di Alle Bocche della Piazza. Diario di anonimo fiorentino (1382-1401 (Olschki, 1986). Per le Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura ha pubblicato Firenze nel Quattrocento. Vol. I, Politica e fiscalità (2006).

The Arte dei rigattieri (merchants of second-hand goods in Florence) has never been ​​the subject of a systematic study, even in scholarship devoted to the history of trades. Underpinned by a large collection of archival material, this book analyzes the social life and economic activity of rigattieri in fifteenth-century Florence. It offers invaluable information on issues such as the relationship between socio-political affiliations and economic interest as well as the structures of consumption and the spending power of different social groups. Furthermore, through the lens of the Arte dei Rigattieri, this work examines the connection between the development of the political bureaucracy, the establishment of Medicean power, and contemporaneous processes of identity construction and social mobility.

Quantitative Studies of the Renaissance Florentine Economy and Society is a collection of nine quantitative studies probing aspects of Renaissance Florentine economy and society. The collection, organized by topic, source material and analysis methods, discusses risk and return, specifically the population’s responses to the plague and also the measurement of interest rates. The work analyzes the population’s wealth distribution, the impact of taxes and subsidies on art and architecture, the level of neighborhood segregation and the accumulation of wealth. Additionally, this study assesses the competitiveness of Florentine markets and the level of monopoly power, the nature of women’s work and the impact of business risk on the organization of industrial production.

Through his research on the status of women in Florence and other Italian cities, Julius Kirshner helped to establish the socio-legal history of women in late medieval and Renaissance Italy and challenge the idea that Florentine women had an inferior legal position and civic status. In Marriage, Dowry, and Citizenship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Kirshner collects nine important essays which address these issues in Florence and the cities of northern and central Italy. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that draws on the methodologies of both social and legal history, the essays in this collection present a wealth of examples of daughters, wives, and widows acting as full-fledged social and legal actors. Revised and updated to reflect current scholarship, the essays in Marriage, Dowry, and Citizenship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy appear alongside an extended introduction which situates them within the broader field of Renaissance legal history.

This book will examine the gradual assembly and consolidation of Portuguese fiscal policy in the second half of the fifteenth century, providing a comparative analysis of the Portuguese State’s finances and fiscal dynamics with other Western European monarchies. This book examines relevant aspects of the Portuguese Royal finances, particularly the different instruments employed to provide income and the rubrics involving all types of expenditure between the reigns of Afonso V and Manuel I at the dawn of Modern Ages. The analysis of Portugal’s case will also serve as a main conducting wire to a broader fiscal examination of other Latin-rooted Mediterranean and North Atlantic kingdoms. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, fiscal history, economic theory and history of economic thought, as well as students of Medieval History, the history of the Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula.

Beginning in the twelfth century, taxation increasingly became an essential component of medieval society in most parts of Europe. The state-building process and relations between princes and their subject cities or between citizens and their rulers were deeply shaped by fiscal practices. Although medieval taxation has produced many publications over the past decades there remains no synthesis of this important subject. This volume provides a comprehensive overview on a European scale and suggests new paths of inquiry. It examines the fiscal systems and practices of medieval Europe, including essential themes such as medieval fiscal theory and the power to tax; royal and urban taxation; and Church taxation. It goes on to survey the entire European continent, as well as including comparative chapters on the non-European medieval world, exploring questions on how taxation developed and functioned; what kinds of problems authorities encountered assessing their fiscal power; and the circulation of fiscal cultures and practices across cities and kingdoms. The book also provides a glossary of the most important types of medieval taxes, giving an essential definition of key terms cited in the chapters. The Routledge Handbook of Public Taxation in Medieval Europe will appeal to a large audience, from seasoned scholars who need a comprehensive synthesis, to students and younger scholars in search of an overview of this critical subject.