Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy by Susan Mosh

Description: Gilding the Market by Susan Mosher Stuard Focusing on the luxury trade, Gilding the Market investigates Italian market towns at the moment when fashion arrived in the fourteenth century. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In the fourteenth century, garish ornaments, bright colors, gilt, and military effects helped usher in the age of fashion in Italy. Over a short span of years important matters began to turn on the cut of a sleeve. Fashion influenced consumption and provided a stimulus that drove demand for goods and turned wealthy townspeople into enthusiastic consumers. Making wise decisions about the alarmingly expensive goods that composed a fashionable wardrobe became a matter of pressing concern, especially when the market caught on and became awash in cheaper editions of luxury wares.Focusing on the luxury trade in fashionable wear and accessories in Venice, Florence, and other towns in Italy, Gilding the Market investigates a major shift in patterns of consumption at the height of medieval prosperity, which, more remarkably, continued through the subsequent era of plague, return of plague, and increased warfare. A fine sensitivity to the demands of "le pompe," that is, the public display of private wealth, infected town life. The quest for luxuries affected markets by enlarging exchange activity and encouraging retail trades. As both consumers and tradesmen, local goldsmiths, long-distance traders, bankers, and money changers played important roles in creating this new age of fashion.In response to a greater public display of luxury goods, civic sumptuary laws were written to curb spending and extreme fashion, but these were aimed at women, youth, and children, leaving townsmen largely unrestricted in their consumption. With erudition, grace, and an evocative selection of illustrations, some reproduced in full color, Susan Mosher Stuard explores the arrival of fashion in European history. Author Biography Susan Mosher Stuard is Professor of History Emeritus at Haverford College. She is editor of Women in Medieval Society and Women in Medieval History and Historiography and author of A State of Deference: Ragusa/Dubrovnik in the Medieval Centuries, all published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Table of Contents Chapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. Desirable WaresChapter 3. Gravitas and ConsumptionChapter 4. Curbing Womens ExcessesChapter 5. Costs of LuxuriesChapter 6. Shops and TradesChapter 7. MarketmakersChapter 8. ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments Review "This highly informative and well written book is one that anyone concerned with material culture in Italy from any period will want to read."--Renaissance Quarterly "Gilding the Market effectively links the material and cultural, showing that fashionable clothing is not simply a matter of visual discourse and self-representation but a primary item of exchange."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History "This wide-ranging book on the late medieval marketplace for luxury goods by a historian of enormous erudition and experience brings a lifetime of research to bear on the world of luxury consumption and ... the advent of fashion."--American Historical Review Promotional Focusing on the luxury trade, Gilding the Market investigates Italian market towns at the moment when fashion arrived in the fourteenth century. Long Description In the fourteenth century, garish ornaments, bright colors, gilt, and military effects helped usher in the age of fashion in Italy. Over a short span of years important matters began to turn on the cut of a sleeve. Fashion influenced consumption and provided a stimulus that drove demand for goods and turned wealthy townspeople into enthusiastic consumers. Making wise decisions about the alarmingly expensive goods that composed a fashionable wardrobe became a matter of pressing concern, especially when the market caught on and became awash in cheaper editions of luxury wares. Focusing on the luxury trade in fashionable wear and accessories in Venice, Florence, and other towns in Italy, Gilding the Market investigates a major shift in patterns of consumption at the height of medieval prosperity, which, more remarkably, continued through the subsequent era of plague, return of plague, and increased warfare. A fine sensitivity to the demands of "le pompe," that is, the public display of private wealth, infected town life. The quest for luxuries affected markets by enlarging exchange activity and encouraging retail trades. As both consumers and tradesmen, local goldsmiths, long-distance traders, bankers, and money changers played important roles in creating this new age of fashion. In response to a greater public display of luxury goods, civic sumptuary laws were written to curb spending and extreme fashion, but these were aimed at women, youth, and children, leaving townsmen largely unrestricted in their consumption. With erudition, grace, and an evocative selection of illustrations, some reproduced in full color, Susan Mosher Stuard explores the arrival of fashion in European history. Review Quote "This wide-ranging book on the late medieval marketplace for luxury goods by a historian of enormous erudition and experience brings a lifetime of research to bear on the world of luxury consumption and . . . the advent of fashion."-- American Historical Review Promotional "Headline" Focusing on the luxury trade, Gilding the Market investigates Italian market towns at the moment when fashion arrived in the fourteenth century. Excerpt from Book Introduction If the fourteenth century fashionable could have seen themselves! Perhaps the first age of fashion would have sputtered out rather than caught fire. As chance had it mirrors adequate for head to toe scrutiny came into use only toward the middle of the next century, so the constructive exercise of self-scrutiny was close to impossible. Consider what those pioneers of fashion might have seen with inspection of their decked out selves: robes hiked up to the calf, then the thigh, right up to the brink of indecency; padded shoulders, tight fit, parti-colored tunics and hose, tasseled hoods, floppy hats, slashed and elongated sleeves, linings as rich as robes themselves; enough gilded silverware in accessories so that the swish and rustle of fine fabrics were set off by the clink and clatter of metal ornament. Garish effects, bright colors, gilt, and military affectations ushered in the age of fashion in Italian market towns. And this refers to mens fashionable garb, the curious role of womens fashion comes into the discussion later. For both men and women the restrained, the refined, the carefully prepared aesthetic staging of self, based on a sober discernment of the niceties of self-fashioning, had to wait for a later day. The first age of fashion was blatantly obvious and adamantly garish, which goes a long way toward explaining fashions initial impact on manners, urban culture, customer preference, and heightened demand for material goods in the fourteenth century. Making wise decisions about the sometimes alarmingly expensive goods that composed fashionable outfits, both purchasing and disposing of them, became a pressing concern in the fourteenth century, not just in the prosperous era before the Black Plague, land wars, bank failures, and other economic misfortunes loomed over the Italian peninsula, but even in the second half of the century when fashion found its way into the normal routine of everyday town life. A fine sensitivity to the demands of " le pompe ," that is, the public display of private wealth, spread from community to community. Display of wealth was a project for market towns where fashion flourished and men took up shopping as a diverting pastime. While the high style of court society had long been recognized by Italian merchants as a lucrative market to be cultivated and fed, courts represented relatively contained and inelastic opportunity. Newer fashion-fed urban consumption promoted a more robust, if volatile, demand for goods like fine fabrics and readymade objects of precious metal. Markets widened over the century even in the face of population retraction. More and more people became part of the fashion parade as popular fashions were interpreted in cheaper editions. Fashions leapt swiftly from place to place, encouraged by fresh ideas that were both playful and alluring. The pace of economic change quickened; where fashion led, townspeople followed. These pages investigate the increased attention paid to consumption, that is, purchase and display of fashion goods in northern Italian towns in the fourteenth century. This was not in any sense the dawn of a new era in the medieval economy. Outside some mechanical clocks there were few genuinely novel products: buttons, for example, had become popular in the late thirteenth century and merely became more important over subsequent decades. There was no major reorienting of markets, imports of fine fabrics from the East were established well before the century began; there was no startling innovation in technology to promote the luxury trades, although it may be ventured that institutional arrangements capable of reducing market imperfections were introduced. For that matter, fashions did not transform class distinctions straight away, although here as well their potential threat to the social order was anticipated, criticized roundly, and sumptuary laws enacted to foil that outcome. Luxuries affected markets by promoting and enlarging exchange activity and turning urban marketplaces into proto-emporia for consumer goods, among them, significantly, fine, readymade goods. Shopping became popular and people of means began to care deeply about appearances. Urban markets for fashion confirm the recombinant and adaptive forces at work in an economy increasingly wracked by war, plague, and other dislocations. Aggressive sellers adapted to compagnie de ventura (mercenary companies) in their neighborhoods and sold luxuries to soldiers when they were flush with their outrageously generous payoffs. In a certain sense there was a flight to quality in the north Italian economy, but that must be qualified as well, for it is apparent that an ambitious town found ways to diversify wares produced for and sold to people of lesser means. The relative wealth of towns was certainly a factor here: Giovanni Villani estimates that James II of Aragon and his brother the King of Sicily had combined yearly incomes lower than that of the city of Florence in the 1330s. Only Philip VI of France and the della Scala of Verona, who briefly controlled thirteen city states in this decade, significantly surpassed Florence in yearly income. And Venetian wealth probably outdid Florentine. Venice dominated the luxury trades before the fourteenth century began and continued to do so when the century ended, while Florence rose to prominence in luxury production, eclipsing neighboring towns and absorbing both their expertise and some of their skilled personnel. Yet even this comes as no surprise: a few cities came out on top in a century that began amid widespread medieval prosperity in Europe and ended with wars and plague, as well as the first intimations of a bullion famine in Europe. Centers of production like Siena and Lucca were left diminished when their skilled emigrants moved elsewhere and inadvertently contributed to the prosperity of more fortunate neighbors. These two cities, early successes in the luxury trades due to industry and technical brilliance, demonstrate the danger posed by wealth acquired through superior industries, coupled with political vulnerability, and in Sienas case, a strategic geographic location on Italys major north-south route, the Francigena. Sienese sumptuary laws, a reflection of the towns precocious wealth, began as early as 1249, and new spending brakes were applied to local consumption frequently thereafter. The prudent Sienese feared raising the envy of their powerful neighbors but laws did not succeed in diverting those who preyed on Sienese wealth. Lucca began writing sumptuary law in 1308 and soon matched Siena in the pace of revisions. Even when some of Luccas most successful silk workers emigrated and made the fortunes of other city-states with their handiwork, silk fabric of new design poured from local looms and, cruelly, helped inspire future raids on Luccas renewing wealth. In a sense the two city states of Lucca and Siena were the casualties of the first age of fashion. Artisans raided, workshops pillaged, products imitated or counterfeited elsewhere, and governments bankrupted by efforts at defense or buying off mercenaries, their dilemma lay in their envied wealth and renewing pool of talent. The stories of Siena and Lucca are interwoven into the stories of their more powerful neighbors, who attacked them but perhaps just as disastrously, absorbed some of their finest talent as well. The transformation to consumer culture can be told through the histories of a broad spectrum of north Italian towns. Verona produced fine cottons that were incorporated into luxury ensembles; Cremona and Pavia produced famed fustians. Padua, a prosperous university town, attracted customers to its marketplace and built up luxury trades. Prato, a satellite to Florence, was home to the loose-knit Datini trading network that at its apogee dealt in luxuries although it began by trading more pedestrian goods and weaponry when Francesco de Marco Datini first established his trading shops at Avignon. Many cities underwent transformation to shopping cultures that attracted travelers to their streets and markets even if only anecdotal evidence remains to hint at the magnitude of the change. Among these Genoa, Milan, and Bologna are of particular significance. Unfortunately, fourteenth century disarray in the voluminous runs of Genoese "documents of practice" and some lacunae in civil records limit proof positive of substantive changes in fourteenth century consumption and merchandizing. In 1157 Genoa had introduced civic sumptuary law to Italy, rendering the lack of any updated sumptuary legislation from that decade until 1402 all the more problematical, for when Genoa gives evidence of renewed sumptuary lawmaking in the fifteenth century, civil authorities promulgated eighteen new codes in less than a century, proceeding at such a clip that two laws a year appeared on two separate occasions. Throughout the fourteenth century prosperous Genoese merchants traveled the silk route to locate the finest imported textiles, and as highly respected conveyers of precious goods from across the known world, supplied European markets with fine silks, brocades, and imported gold. Of course this does not prove that luxury manufactures or shops flourished in town, but even here tantalizing shreds of evidence may be found. Genoas reputation in the gold thread business was established in the thirteenth century when noble women contracted with merchants for production of gold thread, which was then assembled in their own households employing servants who received pay by contract for their labor. This production augmented the citys reputation as connoisseur and purveyor of opulent wares. The Genoese enjoyed a large reputation for enjoying luxuries and rich attire. Giovanni Boccaccio could poke fun at Ermino Grimaldis stinginess when he refused to spend his great Details ISBN0812239008 Author Susan Mosher Stuard Short Title GILDING MARKET Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press Language English ISBN-10 0812239008 ISBN-13 9780812239003 Media Book Format Hardcover Year 2006 Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press Subtitle Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States DOI 10.1604/9780812239003 UK Release Date 2006-02-22 AU Release Date 2006-02-22 NZ Release Date 2006-02-22 US Release Date 2006-02-22 Pages 344 Series The Middle Ages Series Publication Date 2006-02-22 Alternative 9780812205374 DEWEY 381.45687094509023 Illustrations 24 illus. Audience Undergraduate We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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