ABSTRACT
The variety of activities in urbanised areas in the period was considerable, as the discussion of guilds in Chapter 5 highlighted. These organisations were often at the heart of urban working society, but many occupations existed economically and socially above and below them. Contemporaries enthusiastically categorised occupations and status. This is best seen in Tomaso Garzoni’s La Piazza Universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, which was first published in Venice in 1585, and had about 30 editions over the next century. He created an imaginary piazza, a sort of world theatre, in which all occupations are represented from the most noble and respectable at the centre, to the most ignoble, like latrine cleaners on the edges. He mentions about 400 different occupations under 155 separate Discorsi, which mix occupations sometimes in strange ways. Garzoni’s occupations cover the most obvious ones like lawyers, smiths, barbers, dyers, butchers or printers that one expects from the world of guilds; but many less obvious ones like charlatans, charmers, buffoons, bandits, beggars; and even lovers, drunks, layabouts (Otiosi di piazza in Discorso CXVII), pimps and whores, or guards and spies, inquisitors and heretics. He has 18 different kinds of prophets, soothsayers, fortune tellers (in Discorso XL). Godmothers (comari) are brought in with midwives, wetnurses and other nurses as all dealing with pregnant women (Discorso CXXX). Garzoni provides a very complicated view of society, with multiple gradations based on moral worth (partly in a CounterReformation spirit) and concepts of nobility and ignobility, as much as economic importance. He stressed both the integration of activities, whether within the city or between city and countryside, and minute differentiations.1
