The Architecture of Banking in Renaissance Italy

The Architecture of Banking in Renaissance Italy
Author: Lauren Jacobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-03-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781108483223

Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, European society confronted rapid monetization, a process that has been examined in depth by economic historians. Less well understood is the development of architecture to meet the needs of a burgeoning mercantile economy in the Late Middle Ages and early modern period. In this volume, Lauren Jacobi explores some of the repercussions of early capitalism through a study of the location and types of spaces that were used for banking and minting in Florence and other mercantile centers in Europe. Examining the historical relationships between banks and religious behavior, she also analyzes how urban geographies and architectural forms reveal moral attitudes toward money during the onset of capitalism. Jacobi's book offers new insights into the spaces and locations where pre-industrial European banking and minting transpired, as well as the impact of religious concerns and financial tools on those sites.

Medici Money

Medici Money
Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2013-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847656870

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed. To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. Medici Money is one of the launch titles in a new series, Atlas Books, edited by James Atlas. Atlas Books pairs fine writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the world, in a new genre - the business book as literature.

The Building of Renaissance Florence

The Building of Renaissance Florence
Author: Richard A. Goldthwaite
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1982-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780801829772

Patrons - The Guilds - Strozzi family - Succhielli family.

In Fortune's Theater

In Fortune's Theater
Author: Nicholas Scott Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108922333

This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy argues that a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable emerged in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Exploring the rich interchanges between mercantile and intellectual cultures underpinning this development in four major cities - Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan - Nicholas Scott Baker examines how merchants and gamblers, the futurologists of the pre-modern world, understood and experienced their own risk taking and that of others. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not create the modern sense of time, it constructed the foundations on which it could develop. The new conceptions of the past and the future that developed in the Renaissance provided the pattern for the later construction a single narrative beginning in classical antiquity stretching to the now. This book thus makes an important contribution toward laying bare the historical contingency of a sense of time that continues to structure our world in profound ways.

The Venetian Money Market

The Venetian Money Market
Author: Reinhold C. Mueller
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 746
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781421431437

It sets banking—and panics—in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

Writing Architectural History

Writing Architectural History
Author: Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0822988429

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.

The Economy of Renaissance Florence

The Economy of Renaissance Florence
Author: Richard A. Goldthwaite
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 668
Release: 2011-01-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1421400596

Winner, 2010 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize, the Renaissance Society of America2009 Outstanding Academic Title, ChoiceHonorable Mention, Economics, 2009 PROSE Awards, Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers 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.

Out of Italy

Out of Italy
Author: Fernand Braudel
Publisher: Europa Editions
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2019-07-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609455355

From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650. In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, “Italy” exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history. Viewing the Italy?the many Italies?of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period. This is what the acclaimed French historian, Fernand Braudel, achieves here. He brings to life the two extraordinary centuries that span the Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque and analyzes the complex interaction between art, science, politics, and commerce during Italy’s extraordinary cultural flowering.

Crafting identities

Crafting identities
Author: Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1526147696

Crafting identities explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual and political status of London’s crafts and craftsmen were embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London’s artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly on their distinctive individual and collective identities. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural and urban history, as well as those interested in design and architectural history.

The Speculator of Financial Markets

The Speculator of Financial Markets
Author: Daniele D’Alvia
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2023-12-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031479017

The book illustrates financial markets from the point of view of their subjectivity, namely by analysing one of the most prominent figures among market operators: the speculator. Whereas many textbooks or monographs are strictly devoted to the analysis of financial law or history, this book tells a remarkable story based on markets’ boom-bust, expectations, banks’ fragilities, market sentiment, desires, and dreams. In light of this, D’Alvia provides unique financial knowledge and delivers a book that constitutes an outstanding introduction to the topic of the speculator through its historical account and its evolution till modern days. Academics, lawyers, financial regulators, and retail and qualified investors should save a space for it on their shelves.