Keeping Track of the Household: Accounting the Exceptional Spousal Collaboration between Margherita and Francesco Datini

Abstract

Contact Deborah Pellegrino at deborah.pellegrino@yale.edu. I would like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers, Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, and Jane Tylus for their helpful suggestions in improving this article, which draws on my doctoral dissertation, “Women’s Literacy and Numeracy in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florentine Mercantile Culture” (PhD diss., New York University, 2018). 1. The epistolary collection is composed of 244 surviving letters fromMargherita to Francesco and 181 from Francesco to Margherita. It is located in the Archivio Datini in the Archivio di Stato di Prato (hereafter ASPo Datini). This article is based on that archival collection as well as published studies of these documents, including Margherita Datini, Le lettere di Margherita Datini a Francesco di Marco (1384– 1410), ed. Valeria Rosati (Prato, 1977); and Francesco Datini, Le lettere di Francesco Datini alla moglie Margherita: 1385–1410, ed. Elena Cecchi (Prato, 1990). Margherita Datini, Per la tua Margherita: Lettere di una donna del ’300 al marito mercante (Prato, 2002), is a CD-ROM that includes Margherita’s epistles. Important studies of the Datini letters are Federigo Melis, Aspetti della vita economica medievale (Siena, 1962); Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (Boston, 1986); Jérôme Hayez, “ ‘Io non so scrivere a l’amicho per siloscismi’: Jalons pour une lecture de la lettre marchande toscane de la fin du Moyen Age,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 7 (1997): 37–79, and “Le rire du marchand: Francesco di Marco Datini, sa femmeMargherita et les ‘gran maestri’ florentins,” in La famille, les femmes et le quotidien (XIV–XVIII siècle): Textes offerts à Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed. Isabelle Chabot, JérômeHayez, andDidier Lett (Paris, 2006), 407–58; Diana Toccafondi, “Margherita e le altre,” in Datini, Per la tua Margherita; Giampiero Nigro, ed., Francesco di Marco Datini: The Man, the Merchant (Florence, 2010); AnnCrabb,TheMerchant of Prato’sWife:MargheritaDatini andHerWorld, 1360–1423 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2015). For studies of Margherita’s letters in particular, see n. 4 below.