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Il mondo sulla pagina. Manuali di mercanti nell’Italia tardomedievale
Abstract The pratiche di mercatura are a constantly expanding group of manuscripts, whose study provides new insights not only into the history of the Italian Communes, but also into the multifaceted nature of the medieval Italian merchant class’s evolving relationship with knowledge and book culture. Overwhelmingly comprised of multiple contents of disparate origins, the known manuscripts included in the pratiche di mercatura originate mainly from the Tuscan and Venetian areas, over a prolonged period stretching from 1270 to 1483 circa. With these mundane manuscripts, merchants and other middle-class dwellers of the Italian Communes found new ways to materialise focal points of their cultural and day-to-day environments. Their books are witnesses to a merchant class ethos that emerged as a counterpart to Florentine humanism. This essay takes as a basis the research project “Formatting Knowledge of a Wider World” of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ in Hamburg (2020–2023), which through the autoptic study of the known manuscripts of pratiche di mercatura suggests new keys for interpreting this fascinating cultural phenomenon.
