The first full study of the life of Margherita Datini illuminates the role and social standing of wives in early modern Italian society

A warm, intimate, and engrossing biography of Francesco di Marco Datini, who built a powerful mercantile network in fourteenth-century Tuscany, and a peerless evocation of the sensations, personalities, and everyday struggles of Italian life more than half a millennium in the past. “For God and Profit” is how the medieval merchant Francesco di Marco Datini headed a notebook in which he kept track of his business dealings, and these were certainly his guiding lights. Born in the 1330s in the Tuscan town of Prato, the son of a poor taverner, Datini set out at the age of fifteen for Avignon, where, over the course of the next thirty-five years, he made a fortune trading in arms, armor, artworks, wool, saffron, leather, silk, and much more. Returning home, he expanded his operations, setting up offices all across the Mediterranean, which he oversaw through an unceasing flow of correspondence. When he died, Datini asked that all his papers be preserved in his house, and in 1870 they were found, a little worm-eaten and mouse-nibbled but largely intact, in a sack under the stairs. They are one of the great records not only of medieval life but of the emergence of the modern commercial world. Drawing on this rich archive, Iris Origo offers a wonderfully vivid account of Datini’s public and private worlds. The Merchant of Prato is a masterpiece of modern narrative history.

Betrifft die Handschrift Mss.h.h.I.1, p. 289 der Burgerbibliothek Bern (Abb. 60).

This book presents the proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Digital Science (DSIC 2019), held in Limassol, Cyprus, on October 11–13, 2019. DSIC 2019 was an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, results, experiences and concerns in digital science. The main goal of the conference was to efficiently disseminate original findings in the natural and social sciences, art & the humanities. The contributions in the book address the following topics: Digital Art & Humanities Digital Economics Digital Education Digital Engineering Digital Finance, Business & Banking Digital Healthcare, Hospitals & Rehabilitation Digital Media Digital Medicine, Pharma & Public Health Digital Public Administration Digital Technology & Applied Sciences Digital Virtual Reality

Even many Renaissance specialists believe that little secular painting survives before the late fifteenth century, and its appearance becomes a further argument for the secularizing of art. This book asks how history changes when a longer record of secular art is explored. It is the first study in any language of the decoration of Italian palaces and homes between 1300 and the mid-Quattrocento, and it argues that early secular painting was crucial to the development of modern ideas of art. Of the cycles discussed, some have been studied and published, but most are essentially unknown. A first aim is to enrich our understanding of the early Renaissance by introducing a whole corpus of secular painting that has been too long overlooked. Yet "Painted palaces" is not a study of iconography. In examining the prehistory of painted rooms like Mantegna's Camera Picta, the larger goal is to rethink the history of early Renaissance art.

This title, dedicated to the memory of Caroline Villers, is the proceedings of a conference in London in 2005.