Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200-1500

Although the luxurious spending habits of Italians in the Renaissance are well known, this is the first comprehensive study of the sumptuary laws that attempted to regulate the consumption of luxuries. Catherine Kovesi Killerby provides a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than three hundred laws enacted in over forty cities throughout Italy, and sets them in their social context.

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.

1 - Ancient and Early Medieval Precedents
2 - The Origins and Characteristics of Italian Sumptuary Law
3 - Money and People
4 - Ambition and Social Order
5 - The Church and Sumptuary Law
6 - Mulieris delinquentis: Women and Sumptuary law
7 - Problems of Enforcement and the Failure of Sumptuary Law