Petrarch's War

Florence and the Black Death in Context

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"This revisionist account of the economic, literary and social history of Florence in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death connects warfare with the plague narrative. Organised around Petrarch's 'war' against the Ubaldini clan of 1349-1350, which formed the prelude to his meeting and friendship with Boccaccio, William Caferro's work examines the institutional and economic effects of the war, alongside literary and historical patterns. Caferro pays close attention to the meaning of wages in context, including those of soldiers, thereby revising our understanding of wage data in the distant past and highlighting the consequences of a constricted workforce that resulted in the use of cooks and servants on important embassies. Drawing on rigorous archival research, this book will stimulate discussion among academics and offers a new contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Florence. It stresses the importance of short-termism and contradiction as subjects of historical inquiry"-- "Contradiction is the subject of this book. It takes as its title, "Petrarch's War," by way of emphasizing the fact. The author of "Italia mia," the famous pacific poem, ending with a threefold call for peace on the peninsula, wrote a letter to Florentine officials in June 1349 demanding that the city wage war while it was still suffering the immediate effects of the devastating plague of the previous year. Petrarch's call to arms appears in the same collection of epistles (Book Eight of Rerum familiarum libri or Familiares) that also contains his famous lament about the pestilence. Petrarch sent his bellicose letter, Familiares VIII 10, to the Florentine priors. It was transcribed by Giovanni Boccaccio, a long-time admirer of Petrarch, who had recently returned to his native city and was then writing the Decameron. Shortly thereafter Florence sent out its army. The target was the Ubaldini clan of the Upper Mugello, who had attacked two of Petrarch's closest friends as they traveled through the mountainous region"--

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