The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant

by Duccio Balestracci, Betsy Merideth (Translator), Paolo Squatriti (Translator)

In the early 1980s, Duccio Balestracci discovered in a Sienese archive two account books kept from 1450 to 1502 by a Tuscan peasant named Benedetto del Massarizia. Benedetto knew how to read but not how to write. Infected by the urban habit of detailed personal record keeping, he asked various of his literate acquaintances to put into writing the details of his daily affairs. The resulting account books offer an unparalleled glimpse into the economic and social world of late medieval peasants. In Renaissance in the Fields , Balestracci uses these account books and a host of supporting archival records to explore the lives of Benedetto and his family over the course of the fifteenth century. In Benedetto we see how country people could organize land and capital and protect themselves, at least a little, from rapacious landlords and urban administrators. By capturing the changing realities of life in the countryside, Renaissance in the Fields offers the best introduction to how the peasant economy really worked, and to how most people actually lived during the Italian Renaissance.

Genres: History, Renaissance, Italy

176 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1999

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a neat little book, but not as fun as it sounds. "Memoirs" is a pretty generous word in this context: the book is really a study of the account book of the peasant Benedetto, who lived just outside of Siena in the 15th century. That's not to say there isn't a lot of interesting stuff in here - the hum-drum, everyday sort of feel of it is kind of nice, actually. There is also sorts of information about farm life, relations between the town and its countryside, and how the smallest of details (like the construction of a lime kiln) could make such a substantive difference in everyday life. There's also a nice bit about the role of literacy among the peasants (most were not fully literate but they were increasingly aware of its power - Benedetto couldn't write himself, but he was convinced enough of its authority that he found local notaries to record the contents of his account book for him). It's intriguing, but it's not quite a memoir - the only time his two wives pop up is when he's recording their burial costs or the litigation brought against him by his second wife. There is not much in the way of thoughts and feelings.

This is almost like the alternate-universe version of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller. They're a century off and living in different parts of Italy, but the two protagonists are a nice window onto two drastically different ways of looking at what popular culture was during the early modern period. Ginzburg's Menocchio is kinda nuts from a modern perspective, filled with crazy ideas about the universe fermenting into existence from a blob of cosmic cheese. Benedetto is solid, pragmatic, and very 'normal.' They're hard to reconcile in a lot of ways. It's hard to know which one to stress or prioritize when thinking about history.

[R. Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look into a much undiscussed class of historical peoples!

[Charles Nicholas Saenz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the wealth of information available to researchers regarding Italian urban life during the quattrocento, little exists regarding the experience of rural society during this time period. Ducio Balestracci’s "The Renaissance in the Fields" represents an import step towards remedying this imbalance in the historical scholarship. The material used for this study is drawn largely from material contained in two booklets from the collection of the Archivio della Società di Esecutori de Pie Disposizioni in Siena. Because the information contained in these two volumes is limited to statements of account written by various notaries, the author must infer to a large extent the fate of his subjects. However, given these limitations, Balestracci succeeds in drawing a surprisingly detailed vision of life in the Sienese Masse. From his observations, the reader gathers a wealth of understanding involving the life of the village bourgeoisie, including: family structure and male inheritance, simple household economics, gender relations and the financial strains caused by the assemblage of dowries, and the cultivation of land and management of livestock. Based on references to the sale and trade of small goods and lime in Siena and the imposition of both annual and emergency taxation, this work further links the world of the peasant with the economic life of the Renaissance city and the political construct of the Italian city state of the fifteenth century.