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The volume’s titular and structural engagement with Appadurai and Kopy-toff’s work on the biography of objects is understated in the sections themselves.Engagement with it is inconsistent and in some cases does not go much furtherthan a generalized focus on objects. There is nothing essentially wrong with that,of course, but it is a shame because a focus on ‘things in motion’ does suit thiskind of society in which meanings were explicitly displayed and discussed.Where such a focus exists, it leads to a welcome concentration on the eventsthrough which people interact with things and on the various ways in whichobjects accrue value. Many of the most arresting descriptions are those of theways in which objects move, for instance the transportation of marriage cheststhrough the city locked shut, their opulence hinting ‘at the wealth of goods thatlay hidden from general view’ (p. 61). The focus on biography also gives atemporal aspect to the descriptions of use and challenges associations betweensignificance and duration: expensive vessels with ‘rather short lives’ because‘courtly demand for fashionable new styles and the monetary value of theirmaterials meant that precious metalware was sacrificed when economic timeswere hard’ (p. 52); buildings made and re-made: ‘centuries of alterationsundertaken in order to maintain a relationship between religious thought,liturgical practice, architecture, and decoration’ (p. 93).

There are quietly provocative arguments here about the connections betweenobjects and events and the way those who view objects make meaning out ofthem. In many ways most interesting are those events whose meaning nowseems obscure or awkward: the complexities of social division where both‘servants and guests participating at public feasts would have been in contactwith vessels and accoutrements’, but ‘most senior members of the service staffwere members of the nobility’ (p. 45); the difficult series of meanings generatedas a man ‘pays for’ another man’s wife’s services by giving him some clothes, andby giving her a ring which her husband later pawns (p. 74). Questions of valueare left hanging provocatively.

Less helpful is the fact that the connections between the sections, connectionswhich might have articulated those stages of creation, use and reuse into a morespecific sense of Italian object biographies, remain implicit. This is partlybecause the introductions to the sections are so brief and partly because themain Introduction subtly extends the three subsequent sections rather thanmore directly addressing the anthropological methods and theories that the titleindicates underpin them. Mulled over sufficiently, however, a lot is packed intothis slim volume; big claims are made for small objects, which can only be agood thing, and with any luck it will generate further debate about the methodsby which we analyse ‘pre-modern’ things.University of Birmingham CATHERINE RICHARDSON

Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Edited by Roger J. Crum and John T.Paoletti. Cambridge University Press. 2006. xvii + 674pp. £85.00/$150.00.

Although the title of this weighty volume suggests a general overview ofFlorentine social history, it is organized around a specific central theme, that ofspace. As such, it champions an interdisciplinary approach to urban history thatbrings together historians of art and social/cultural historians and is informedby theoretical approaches from urban studies more generally. The result is a

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stimulating take on the history of Florence that further demonstrates the value,evident in recent work on material culture, of studying the physical realities ofspace in relation to lived practices and cultural meanings. The introductoryessay by Crum and Paoletti discusses this notion of space in historiographicalcontext. They emphasize a concept of space as a malleable frame that wasshaped by, as well as shaping, human activity. This focus on practice builds in adynamic aspect: the contributors to the volume provide many examples of howrepeated practice constructed the sense of history associated with place andhow this meaning could shift over time. While this is not particularly novel interms of theory, what is important is its concerted application in a traditionallyconservative field of scholarship.

The individual essays are generally of a high standard, and I will discuss themin thematic groups for the sake of brevity. Broad surveys by John Najemy andSharon Strocchia provide useful overviews of the Florentine built environmentin political and social context, underlining the theatrical character of daily life,while Stephen Milner and Sarah Blake McHam present more focused studies ofthe central sites of power in and around the Palazzo della Signoria. There issome repetition of material among these four essays, but the authors mostlyavoid treading on each other’s toes. Stimulating essays by Michael Lingohr andespecially by Crum and Paoletti focus on the patrician domestic spaces of countryvilla and city palace, highlighting the permeable nature of the public/privateboundary. On the corporate use of space, Philip Gavitt looks at the use of civicspaces by confraternities in general, Adrienne Atwell examines the routes takenby the wool guild to display Florentine products to buyers, while DavidRosenthal focuses on the history of one of the festive organizations or ‘kingdoms’– his essay forms an excellent companion to that by Nicholas Eckstein onneighbourhood social life. Two contributors look at the theme of gender: GuidoRuggiero explores masculinity through a micro-study of Manetti’s short story,‘The Fat Woodworker’, while Natalie Thomas offers a more conventionaloverview of the spatial limits affecting women’s lives; the approaches here are sodifferent that the essays are uncomfortable bedfellows, despite their individualmerits. A larger group of essays examines religious space: Robert Gastonexamines the spatial development and changing function of churches, JonathanKatz Nelson focuses on the private chapels that proliferated within them, PeterHoward presents an interesting discussion of the activity of preachers and thespaces in which they performed, and Saundra Weddle gives an overview of thedevelopment of Florence’s convents over a long timeframe. In the final group ofessays on artistic production, discussion moves away from the theme of space tomake related points about material and visual culture in general. A closelyfocused essay by Anabel Thomas shows how networks of personal relationsenabled artists to transcend the limits of locality and reach out into a widerworld. Patricia Emison discusses the production of replicated images and theconsequences of this for the development of Florence’s visual culture and the artmarket, while Andrea Bolland looks at the changing concept of the artist inrelation to the context of production.

Overall, the volume coheres solidly around its central theme and the editorsare to be lauded for their interdisciplinary approach. The result is a fresh visionof Florence’s history that will be useful for teaching but that also contains newresearch. The volume is attractively presented with numerous black and white

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illustrations and also includes extensive notes, select bibliography and a nameand subject index.University of Sheffield JAMES SHAW

Early Modern

The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy. By Lee Palmer Wandel.Cambridge University Press. 2006. xi + 302pp. £14.99.

One of the most consistent topics in Reformation historiography of all kindshas been the issue of how far the Reformation as a political event was related toactual belief and differences in belief. In general, historians have stuck ratherrigidly either to one mode or the other in analysing the ecclesiastical upheavalsof the sixteenth century. This book takes as its theme the culture of the celebrationof the eucharist, something which, before the Reformation, was already deeplyaffected by a fragmented theology and diversity of practice, but was radicalizedand politicized by the Reformation.

The author argues in the first chapter that this is surprising in some wayssince the theology of the eucharist is primarily concerned with unanimity andhomogeneity. The second chapter is a case study of Augsburg (in fact, the bookis really a series of case studies), the narrative aspects of which show how secularforces tended to shape the expression of confessions of faith. Subsequent chaptersdeal with, for example, the continuities in Luther’s eucharistic practice fromearlier times, and his deployment of medieval precedents, despite his derisiveaccount of popish error. The book rehearses, as we might expect, the conflictbetween Luther and other evangelicals. This might have been the place torehearse also the philosophical basis for Luther’s thought about this and otherissues, something which is briefly mentioned in the first chapter but is notdeveloped subsequently. Personally I would not have minded seeing somethingabout England here. In some ways, England and its rather odd monarchicallydriven version of the Reformation provided a test case for a lot of the conflictover how far different kinds of Reformation thought should be implemented inpractice. But here, it seems, England does not seem to count as Europe. We thenmove on to Nuremberg, and a lot of interesting detail about images. Next wetake in the fully Reformed attitudes to these things, and finally come to theCatholics and the theology of Trent.

Overall, one is struck by the weirdness of the Reformers’ insistence that theycannot define precisely and absolutely what it is that happens in the eucharist,and also that so many of their different positions are, at some level, entirelycompatible; and yet the eucharist proved to be such an extraordinarily divisiveand contentious issue. By contrast, in their political thought one can, as often asnot, quite easily grasp the basis of their different attitudes to the nature andexercise of political power. Fundamentally, I think, the book is about whatmattered to professional theologians, polemicists, pastors and troublemakers,rather than about the opinions of those who inhabited the pews (though suchopinions are always difficult to describe and define, and are something which,generally, has to be addressed via a species of local rather than ideologicalhistory).Queen Mary, University of London MICHAEL QUESTIER