ABSTRACT
In the 1970s the historiography of the Italian Renaissance city was revolutionized by approaches and methods imported from the fields of anthropology and sociology. As an idealized antecedent of the nineteenth-century liberal European male, Jacob Burckhardt's Renaissance man was an autonomous historical actor unencumbered by medieval corporations like the church and the medieval clan. Ronald Weissman described Florence as a society in which the experience of neighbourhood was a fact of everyday life, especially for artisans, shopkeepers and the lower classes in general. Benedetto Dei alternates catalogues of political figures and events with passages of patriotic boasting in an account that maps Florence as an opulent environment crowded with magnificent buildings and busy workshops, and ordered by graceful piazzas and noble thoroughfares. At times Benedetto's chronicle reads like a guidebook for a walking tour, as he reels off lists that conflate prominent citizens with the built environment.
