Sumptuary Law In Italy 12001500 Catherine Kovesi Killerby by Catherine Kovesi Killerby 9780199247936, 0199247935 instant download after payment.

The luxurious spending habits of Italians in the Renaissance are well known. The new luxury, however, was not greeted with universal approval, and chroniclers, poets, churchmen, and statesmen were often critical of, and preoccupied by, its effects. The most voluminous and telling evidence of this preoccupation is the body of laws enacted to restrict and regulate all aspects of luxury consumption — the so-called sumptuary laws. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian sumptuary laws through a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than three hundred laws enacted in over forty cities throughout the peninsula. It examines the nature of these laws up to 1500 and relates them to the circumstances, the framework of ideas and the habits of mind that gave rise to them.