Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200-1500 (Oxford Historical Monographs)

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. In this book Catherine Kovesi Killerby offers the first comprehensive study of Italian sumputuary laws through a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than three hundred laws enacted in over forty cities throughout the peninsula. She examines the nature of these laws up to 1500 and relates them to the cricumstances, the framework of ideas and the habits of mind which gave rise to them.