Richard A. Goldthwaite, a leading economic historian of the Italian Renaissance, has spent his career studying the Florentine economy. In this magisterial work, Goldthwaite brings together a lifetime ...of research and insight on the subject, clarifying and explaining the complex workings of Florence’s commercial, banking, and artisan sectors.
Florence was one of the most industrialized cities in medieval Europe, thanks to its thriving textile industries. The importation of raw materials and the exportation of finished cloth necessitated the creation of commercial and banking practices that extended far beyond Florence’s boundaries. Part I situates Florence within this wider international context and describes the commercial and banking networks through which the city's merchant-bankers operated. Part II focuses on the urban economy of Florence itself, including various industries, merchants, artisans, and investors. It also evaluates the role of government in the economy, the relationship of the urban economy to the region, and the distribution of wealth throughout the society.
While political, social, and cultural histories of Florence abound, none focuses solely on the economic history of the city. The Economy of Renaissance Florence offers both a systematic description of the city's major economic activities and a comprehensive overview of its economic development from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance to 1600.
This article calls attention to the personal accounts kept by Florentines for their private affairs. Well over a thousand of these documents survive from the late fourteenth century onwards, and they ...constitute a source that for the early period probably has no equal for any other city in Europe. Kept according to the highest standards of accounting practice at the time, these accounts document the personal activity of Florentines in the marketplace outside the sphere of their business interests, an area barely adumbrated in the literature on the economic and social history of the city. Of the several functions this activity served, this article concentrates exclusively on just one: the household economy. It explores this subject through a survey of several hundred such accounts with the objective of bringing this source into the extensive literature in Florentine studies on the family, material culture and the economy in general. The discussion emphasizes the importance of change across time and touches on the wider issue of the cultural significance of the accounting practice that brought these documents into existence.
This article explores cultural aspects of the unique archival patrimony of private account books that survive for Florence from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, a period corresponding ...to the city’s greatness as a center of both Renaissance culture and early capitalism. The discussion first surveys the diffusion and the standardization of accounting practice throughout the society, the educational process behind this development, and the emergence of the professional accountant. It then analyzes double entry in its application to both business (including industrial) and domestic accounts in the attempt to extend our knowledge of the accounting reality in this pre-modern capitalist economy beyond the traditional view derived from manuals and theoretical notions. The conclusion examines the cultural functions of Florentine accounting practice ranging from the so-called spirit of capitalism in the business world to some particular characteristics that disposed Florentines in general toward this kind of record keeping.
This is the first in a series of studies of the Florentine economy from 1494 to 1512, a period of considerable political instability both at home and abroad. Since the principal source is the city's ...rich patrimony of accounts books, this first article concentrates on technical monetary problems, in particular the complex co-existence of several moneys-of-account and the increased circulation of the gold florin. The conclusion points to some of the economic, social and even cultural implications of the discussion.
Orpheus in the Marketplace Carter, Tim; Goldthwaite, Richard A
2013, 2013., 2013-11-04, Letnik:
10
eBook
This record of Florentine musician Jacopo Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and ...early seventeenth centuries, and opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism.
The Selfridge Collection of Medici manuscripts at Harvard Business School's Baker Library is the largest collection of Renaissance Florentine account books outside Italy. This collection documents ...both the business and personal economic activities of one branch of the Medici family through six generations, extending from the early fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century. It would be difficult to find, even in Florence, another family whose economic activities are so well documented over such a long span of time, a period we know as the Renaissance. This patrimony of family documents was sold by the Medici heirs through an auction at Christie's of London in 1918; and in 1927 the buyer, H. Gordon Selfridge, deposited the ledgers at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Around one hundred ledgers arrived at Harvard at that time, but one item in the Christie's inventory was missing. In 2007, I found this missing item in the catalogue of a Munich antiquarian book dealer, but it had already been sold to a private collector in Germany. When informed of its importance for the Harvard collection, the new owner of the ledger kindly permitted Laura Linard, director of Historical Collections at Baker Library, to have it microfilmed; and so finally, after eighty years, the missing item has returned, at least in a photographic version, to its original home, thereby completing the Selfridge Collection. This event could be the occasion for a reevaluation of a major collection of business documents too long ignored by historians.
The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete,Euridice(1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. The ...recent discovery of a large number of private account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and opens a new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. They also allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.
We present a systematic investigation of strong exciton–photon coupling in functionalized pentacene (TIPS-Pn)-based films in all-metal cavities, depending on molecular concentration and film ...morphology. Rabi splittings of up to 270 meV are observed, with the highest values achieved in pristine amorphous TIPS-Pn films. The exciton–photon interaction strength for the lowest-energy (0–0) excited state scaled with the square root of the molecular density, which was independent of whether the long-range molecular order were present in films. The molecular populations in the disordered regions of the films coupled to the cavity most strongly in all films, including pristine crystalline films. Such populations, with molecular configurations favoring interaction with the cavity electromagnetic field, were not readily identifiable in optical absorption spectra of bare (i.e., not coupled to the cavity) films, which highlights the capability of polariton spectroscopy to reveal these molecular ensembles, which are “hidden” in polycrystalline films. The linear scaling of the exciton–photon interaction strength with the square root of the oscillator strengths was observed in dilute TIPS-Pn:PMMA films but not in pristine TIPS-Pn films, either amorphous or crystalline. In particular, in pristine films, the exciton–photon interaction strength for the vibronic (0–m, m > 0) excitons was higher than expected based on the oscillator strengths extracted from the optical spectra of bare films, which was attributed to enhanced exciton delocalization facilitated by the 2D brickwork motif of TIPS-Pn. Similar observations were made in functionalized anthradithiophene (diF TES-ADT) films (also exhibiting a 2D brickwork packing motif) but not in functionalized tetracene (TIPS-Tc) films, which suggests that the underlying mechanisms rely on short-range intermolecular interactions determined by the molecular packing motif and resulting nanomorphology.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly aggressive cancer with poor patient survival. Toward understanding the underlying molecular alterations that drive PDAC oncogenesis, we conducted ...comprehensive proteogenomic analysis of 140 pancreatic cancers, 67 normal adjacent tissues, and 9 normal pancreatic ductal tissues. Proteomic, phosphoproteomic, and glycoproteomic analyses were used to characterize proteins and their modifications. In addition, whole-genome sequencing, whole-exome sequencing, methylation, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), and microRNA sequencing (miRNA-seq) were performed on the same tissues to facilitate an integrated proteogenomic analysis and determine the impact of genomic alterations on protein expression, signaling pathways, and post-translational modifications. To ensure robust downstream analyses, tumor neoplastic cellularity was assessed via multiple orthogonal strategies using molecular features and verified via pathological estimation of tumor cellularity based on histological review. This integrated proteogenomic characterization of PDAC will serve as a valuable resource for the community, paving the way for early detection and identification of novel therapeutic targets.
Display omitted
•Proteogenomic characterization reveals the functional impact of genomic alterations•Phosphoproteomics uncovers putative therapeutic targets downstream of KRAS•Multiomics links endothelial cell remodeling and glycolysis to immune exclusion•Proteomics and glycoproteomics reveal candidates for early detection or intervention
Comparative multiomic analyses of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumors with normal adjacent and pancreatic ductal tissues provide insight into genomic, proteomic, and immune dysregulation in driving disease.
PDF