Florentine families and Florentine diaries in the fourteenth century

Abstract

‘In the name of God, amen. The notebook of Guido Filippi dell'Antella, in which he will set down certain memorials (ricordanze), beginning on the Kalends of March, in the year Mcclxxxxviii.’ These words form the perfunctory but typical heading of one of the first in a long and miscellaneous series of private memoirs which survive in such numbers from so many different families as to make it probable they were kept by every man of business or distinction in later medieval Florence. Every variety of information is contained in them, from business accounts and details of estate management to records of taxation, births, marriages and deaths, family feuds, and the dry record in certain instances of successful vendetta. Not all were simply domestic chronicles : the history of Florence, even at its most democratic, remains in large measure the history of its principal families, whose diaries therefore may be purely political. Even so, business and financial memoranda are normally present if not predominant in ricordanze, and for this reason they may represent the earliest and most simple type of book-keeping.