Provincial families of the Renaissance - James S Grubb

Historical writing on the Renaissance has usually focused on the social extremes that co-existed in the great metropolitan centres - on either elites or the underclass. As a result, the world of the middling families and provincial societies remains largely explores. Daily experiences in the lesser cities are, however, no less rich and revealing that those of Florence, Venice and Milan. In addition, these experiences offer perspectices from which to reassess familiar assumptions about domestic life in the 15th century.;Based on memoirs and other records left by 13 merchant families from the Veneto cities of Verona and Vincenza, Grubb examines the attitudes and experiences of families undistinguished in the modest means and local ambitions from the majority of their compatriots, uncovering a detailed historical landscape rich in social obligations, commercial activities and religious beliefs.;Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' lives investigates significant aspects of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. In reconstructing provincial life in the Veneto, Grubb discovers in his subjects an independence of mind that mediated their reception of metropolitan ideologies far more than the historiography of the Renaissance might suggest. These provincials were agents of their own destiny, influenced in equal measures by prevailing attitudes, local customs and presonal convictions.