Shopping in the old days.(Books about antiques)(Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600)(Book Review)

In Florence in 1575 the rumored birth of a male heir to grand duke Francesco de' Medici caused all the shopkeepers to pull down their shutters for the day "because of their worries that the plebians would act according to their custom and put the goods in the shops to the sack." This odd reaction to a blessed event is one of the many gleanings to be made in Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600.

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With the freedom of a self-proclaimed cultural historian. Evelyn Welch, a professor at the University of London, browses within her subject to include lotteries, fairs, auctions, mail order, pawnbrokers, the sale of indulgences, and a vivid portrait of Isabella d'Este, the wife of Francesco Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua, and a fearless shopper. Her brother-in-law, Ludovico Maria Sforza of Milan, wrote to Isabella in 1491 describing a shopping expedition in the rain comprising his wife and her cousin. To stay dry they were "wearing little woollen cloths, or headdresses over their heads." This not being the custom in Milan, women in the street "began to make villainous remarks," only to be roundly cursed by Ludovico's wife. He concludes: "I believe that when your Ladyship, who is so spirited, is here ... if any one dares to say villainous things to you, you will defy them all and give those women a real knifing!" Obviously sharp elbows were just the beginning in the fifteenth century.

In addition to shouting matches, shopping started and stopped to the sound of bells, as did many other rituals in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian towns. At first the bells marked the six canonical hours and the eight hours of the Virgin. Bells to signal civic obligations were simply added to the liturgical divisions of the day. Bell towers with clocks and sometimes automata activated by the changing hours were commonplace in most northern Italian cities by the end of the fourteenth century. To avoid confusion, different rhythms and differently tuned bells marked specific times of the day. To be heard by everyone, the bells had to be quite robust. Even so, in the fourteenth century those living on the outskirts of Treviso asked for an additional bell nearby so they would not miss anything. Amid this relative bedlam, silence was much prized, and that too was decreed by the authorities. In the fourteenth century the grocers' guild of Florence, for example, forbade members to attract customers in other shops by calling over to ...