Datini Archive Documents as a Source for Studying the Ethical Concepts of the Premodern Business Man

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Abstract:

The article provides an analysis of documents from the Datini archive, the purpose of which is to determine the prospects for studying the ethical views of a business person of the premodern era on their material.

During the High and Late Middle Ages in Western Europe, there was a “rise of cities” due to the activities of the most mobile and creative social groups of medieval townspeople — merchants, and later entrepreneurs and financiers. Their occupations and way of life contributed to the development of a different type of behavior, new ethical attitudes. One of these business people was Francesco Datini (1335-1410).

The methodological basis of the research was formed by the theory of the ethos of the Polish researcher Maria Ossovskaya, which was perceived by domestic scientists in the post-Soviet period.

The analysis made it possible to establish the linguistic identity of 148265 letters from the archive. Most of them were written in Tuscan “volgare”. This confirmed the prevailing point of view in historiography about the formation of commercial and financial companies in the cities of medieval Tuscany mainly on the basis of family ties. There were also found letters in Latin, Catalan, Provencal and other languages.

Due to the linguistic diversity of sources and the vast geography of their origin, it seemed the most promising to use the methods of “digital history” in further research, which implies the creation of a prosopographic database of Datini’s correspondents and the construction of a GIS on its basis.

The linguistic affiliation of the letters was the main marker of the cultural and national identity of their authors, however, the supranational factor that united these people was their belonging to the ethos of a business man of the premodern era, which is characterized by a combination of irrational religiosity with the emerging rational pragmatics.

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