A FULL SKETCH OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28257, 20 April 1957, Page 3

A FULL SKETCH OF THE MIDDLE AGES

The Merchant of Prato. By Irisi Origo. Cape. 380 pp. Bibliography. Index.

This unusual biography is valuable as an authentic record of Italian social history in the fourteenth and . fifteenth centuries; and will appeal to many different kinds of readers for widely different reasons. As a Book Society “alternative non-fiction choice” it has already been well received both in England and in America. Prato is a small town in Italy not far from Florence, and the merchant is one, Francesco Datini, who died some five and a half centuries ago (in 1410). He was a very wealthy man who made a hobby of saving all his private and business papers, and when he died he left instructions that his massive collection of some 150,000 letters, more than 500 ledgers and account books and hundreds of commercial papers should be preserved. About 100 years ago, these papers were brought to light, and Italian scholars have long made use oi this mine of information concerning medieval trade. But Datini had not confined his collecting habit to commercial papers alone. He also kept many hundreds of purely personal papers—letters to and from Margherita his wife, from their relatives, friends and servants. The Marquesa Origo has now edited and arranged this enormous correspondence and from it has compiled this most interesting biography. The letters are all remarkably self-revealing; the characters of both the merchant and his wife emerge clearly, and for the reader there come alive all the activities of day-to-day life, of household management, cooking, dress and travel, as well as the hopes and fears and spiritual problems of people who have been dead for nearly 600 years. The career of Datini is one ol the great success stories of the Middle Ages. At the age of fifteen —orphaned by the Black Death —he set forth from Tuscany to make his fortune in Avignon. Later he returned a rich man —not to retire, but to become the head of a great import and export business with branches in Pisa, Genoa, Barcelona and Majorca, his ships carrying spices from Constantinople, iron from Rumania, wool from England, slaves from the Black Sea and Barbery. The most remarkable thing about his domestic correspondence (over 100 of his wife’s letters are here, too) is not that it should have been preserved all these years, but that it should have been written at all. A singularly genuine picture of married life in the fourteenth century emerges, and the details of domestic intercourse that are revealed are delightful. So clearly do Datini and Margherita draw their own

portraits and those of their friends, we could hardly fail to recognise them if we met them in the streets of Prato today. Apart from its inherent human interest, however, this book is valuable for the light it throws on the way men thought in Datini’s day. For society was m transition, and the unquestioning orthodoxy of the Middle Ages was at this time giving place to the sceptical, inquiring mind of the Renaissance. Being a merchant, adaptable and shrewd, Datini inevitably belonged to the trend away from orthodoxy. Although the manner of his life was shaped by local custom and piety, his private thought belonged to the new. world that was beginning to take form. He belonged to it by his spirit of enterprise, his commercial methods, his international connexions and his own intense individualism; and though he himself often expressed surprise at the direction in which his thought carried him, we today can understand and appreciate the influences which moved him. This picture of Datini, his life, thought and times is thus as valuable to the student of history as it is interesting to the general reader.

Iris Origo is an experienced biographer. She has here handled her material with considerable skill. The book is fully documented, but the author has wisely relegated all references to the appendices, so that notes do not interfere with the continuity of the text. Many students will find her bibliography and list of sources useful, and there is an adequate index. Special reference must be made to the 25 pages of quaint medieval illustrations, for these are of interest in themselves as well as for the flavour they give to the book as a whole.

The Wishing Star. By Ella McFadyen. Illustrated by Ernst Corvus. Angus and Robertson. 32 pp. A bright feature of this book is to be found in its coloured illustrations which appeal to a child of five. The story it contains, however, about a gay Christmas party in a sky fairyland, is couched in language at the level of a child of 10 to 12 years of age and it contains a number of coined words such as “laughingest,” “lonesomes,” and “nursable” added to which, some of the notions it introduces would require some little explanation in order to be grasped by a child. One such notion is that of ‘ ‘Dream Constellation Airlines.” It is a story that requires so much breaking down in order to get it across to the child’s mind that one is balked in the attempt and left wondering whether the whole story were not better re-written. r