By Letizia Nuscis, University of Teramo
‘Give Margherita my blessing, and tell her that if I ever regain enough strength in my hands, I will write to her in my own hand. But I cannot; I believe it is because of my sins.’ With these words, in June 1385, Dianora Gherardini (d. 1388) ended a letter sent from Avignon to her son-in-law, the Prato merchant Francesco di Marco Datini (c. 1335-1410; see Figure 1 above).1 The daughter of the Florentine magnate Cione Gherardini, known as Pelliccia, and the widow of Domenico Bandini, Dianora was the mother of Margherita Bandini (1360-1423), who had married Datini in 1376. Ill and elderly, she no longer had the strength to take up the pen and write in her own hand. She therefore relied on others to put her messages into writing.
The letter belongs to the Datini collection, housed in the State Archives of Prato. Containing more than 150,000 letters and hundreds of account books, the archive was produced by Datini’s mercantile companies and by the extensive network of relatives, agents, associates, and correspondents connected to his household. Alongside business records, it preserves a substantial corpus of private correspondence, including sixteen letters sent by Dianora from Avignon between 1383 and 1388. Most were addressed to Francesco and other family members living in Tuscany. Only three appear to have been written in her own hand; during the final years of her life, she increasingly relied on others to write on her behalf.
Dianora’s letters are not historical texts in the conventional sense. They were not composed to preserve her family’s story for posterity, but to address immediate needs. Yet, to support her claims, she reconstructed past events selectively, framing circumstances differently depending on her addressee. Her letters thus demonstrate how pragmatic correspondence could deploy a purposeful account of earlier events to shape present decisions. Two letters, sent on 28 March 1387 and concerning her Florentine house, offer a clear example of this strategy, rooted in an ongoing property dispute.
Dianora retained ownership of a house in the Florentine quarter of Santo Spirito, valued at around four hundred florins (the exact amount of the unpaid dowry promised for Margherita’s marriage to Francesco). The coincidence between the property’s value and the amount of Margherita’s unpaid dowry made the house a recurring point of contention over family finances and her daughter’s expectations. When Francesco and Margherita returned to Tuscany in late 1382, disputes expanded beyond the house to personal belongings Dianora had requested to be sent to Avignon, which relatives withheld to cover property expenses.
In 1387, ill and in financial distress, Dianora sought to turn the house into immediate funds. Since Francesco wished to use the property, she agreed to negotiate, but strictly in exchange for four hundred fiorini di camera, free of any liability for the prestanza, reserving the right for herself or her son Bartolomeo to buy it back. Otherwise, she intended to sell the house directly. On 28 March, she sent two separate letters regarding this request, one to Francesco and another to Margherita. Despite sharing the same objective, the two messages framed the transaction in markedly different ways.
In the letter to Francesco, Dianora states her position explicitly, agreeing to let him use the house only under strict conditions:
I am very glad that you are returning to the house for your own satisfaction and for hers, provided that you send me the sum of 400 fiorini di camera, that I am not required to pay any forced levy (prestanza), and that the said house is returned to me or to Bartolomeo whenever the said 400 florins are repaid. Otherwise, I do not want you or anyone else to enter it, because I intend to sell it and have the money come directly into my hands.
The tone is predominantly transactional. Dianora acknowledges Francesco’s interest, but sets the price, assigns the expenses, and defines the terms for reclaiming the property. The language of kinship remains secondary to the precise definition of financial obligations.
The letter to Margherita pursues the same goal through a markedly different register. Dianora does not ask her daughter to buy the property, but to persuade her husband. She supports her request by invoking Margherita’s knowledge of her past hardships and by introducing a scriptural allusion: ‘I think you know enough of the troubles I have suffered in this world […] but, as I believe you have heard it said, the Gospel says that man does not live by bread alone.’
Compared with the predominantly financial register of the letter to Francesco, the message to Margherita appeals to generosity, family honor, and consolatione:
I want you to know that I am not so ungenerous that, if I had the means to pay the said sum, as your husband Francesco does, I would refuse to give the house to you both for your comfort. But I cannot do so, and this grieves me. Wherefore I pray you, my daughter, that, for the comfort and honor of us all, you urge and beseech Francesco to pay the said money; he loses nothing by doing so and is capable of undertaking far greater matters than this.
She closes her appeal by explicitly invoking filial duty: ‘I trust that in this and in all other matters you will act as every good daughter ought to do, and I put great faith in you.’
The two letters are not simple duplicates. To Francesco, Dianora presents herself as a property owner engaged in negotiation; to Margherita, she speaks as a mother, framing her daughter’s support as an expression of family solidarity. This strategic divergence extends beyond rhetoric to the physical documents themselves. Although sent on the same day, neither letter is autographic: they were drafted by two distinct hands. The missive to Francesco features a cursive mercantesca, whereas the one to Margherita adopts a more measured script blending mercantesca with chancery traits. Dianora’s surviving correspondence features multiple hands alongside her own. Three early letters from 1383-1384 are autographic; their elementary, laborious mercantesca reveals functional literacy. Thus, when Dianora declared in 1385 that she no longer had ‘the strength in my hands’, she was bemoaning the loss of the physical ability to write, not an inability to compose.
In late medieval epistolary culture, composing a letter and setting it to paper were separable operations. A sender might dictate word for word, outline only the main points, or allow a scribe greater freedom to reformulate the message. The presence of another hand therefore demonstrates neither a lack of agency on the sender’s part nor a perfectly faithful transcription of her spoken words. In Dianora’s case, scribal mediation provided the material means through which her communicative strategy took shape.
The linguistic and rhetorical differences between Dianora’s two letters could derive from her own conscious adaptation to her addressees, from the intervention of the scribes, or from an interaction between these factors. The documents allow us to recognize Dianora’s overall agency (the decision to write separately, the financial demand, and the distinct pressure placed on her interlocutors) but not to isolate a pure or unmediated female voice behind the hands that set her messages down in writing. Nevertheless the letters reveal a form of textual production in which Dianora’s initiative, scribal skills, epistolary conventions, and family relationships worked together. They are hybrid both in genre (combining property negotiation, family appeal, and an interested reconstruction of earlier events) and in authorship. Reading them therefore requires us to consider not only what a woman wrote about the past, but also the hands and relationships through which her account acquired material form.
Letizia Nuscis is a PhD student at the University of Teramo. Her research explores Margherita Bandini and women’s social networks in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscany through archival sources and epistolary practices. Her interests include women’s history, mercantile writing culture, and the social and economic dynamics of late medieval society.
References
Crabb, A., “‘If I Could Write’: Margherita Datini and Letter Writing, 1385-1410”, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), pp. 1170-1206.
Crabb, A., The Merchant of Prato’s Wife: Margherita Datini and Her World, 1360-1423, Ann Arbor 2015.
Hayez, J., “Le rire du marchand: Francesco Datini, sa femme Margherita et les ‘gran maestri’ florentins”, in Les femmes et le quotidien (XIVe-XVIIIe siècle): Textes offerts à Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Paris 2006.
Origo, I., The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410, London 1957.
Archivio di Stato di Prato
ASPO Datini, 1092, 16, 6000156
ASPO Datini, 1089.02, 14, 6000159
- Figure 1 shows the Palazzo Pretorio and the monument to Francesco di Marco Datini in Prato. Photograph by the author. ↩︎