A Woman’s Role in a Merchant’s Business Network: Margherita Datini, 1384–1410

• In Event: Manuscripts and Merchants II

Abstract

Margherita Datini had an important part in the wide-ranging fourteenth-century business network run by her husband Francesco Datini. Francesco, the so-called “merchant of Prato,” directed through correspondence companies in Avignon, Spain, Italy, and with agents around the Mediterranean. He remained mostly in Prato and Florence, basing his economic decisions on the detailed letters sent by employees. The couple, often moving separately between Prato and Florence, wrote each other almost daily over twenty-five years. Margherita’s letters describe an environment in which there was little separation between household and business, and recounts her relations with apprentices, her management of different aspects of Francesco’s correspondence, and her relations with debtors. The Datini correspondence as a whole also shows a connection between the business and personal, with men’s business letters regularly providing news about female relatives. The Datini correspondence is significant for business history, but also for medieval and renaissance gender history

Author

• Ann M. Crabb, James Madison University