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REVIEWS
| Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. By Carole Collier Frick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv plus 347 pp. $47.00).
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| This book presents a detailed discussion of style, the clothing industry and its technical underpinnings, economic history, social decorum, gender, and changing social customs in Florence from the end of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Frick's evidence derives from substantive archival searches and from diaristic accounts of the period. Given the breadth of Frick's concerns, it is perhaps not surprising that one occasionally feels overwhelmed with details, losing sight of the reason for them in the first place. Chapters are divided into multiple subheads and one often feels as if there might be more information that could be teased out of what seems a very copious and extended outline. |
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One of the more interesting aspects of this book comes at the outset where Frick talks of the improving social position of the tailor (sarto) and the importance—and thus the substantive remuneration—of this overlooked trade during this time. It is hard to imagine that there is any aspect of the manufacture and meaning of clothing that Frick has overlooked. Her appendices of currencies, measures, and weights, of categories of clothiers, and of types of clothing and the standard measure of cloth involved in their making are extraordinarily useful. Frick also includes an appendix of inventories of two Minerbetti trousseaux, which gives some insight into the value of this exchange within the elaborated wedding rituals of the period and within a very particular social group. |
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