” Circuits et réseaux se trouvent dominés régulièrement par des groupestenaces qui se les approprient et en interdisent l’exploitation aux autres,le cas échéant. » Cette réflexion de Fernand Braudel s’est trouvée au coeurdes préoccupations d’un séminaire qui s’est tenu àl’Institut universitaireeuropéen de Florence pendant l’année 2001-2002, dont le but était de relireles deux grands ouvrages de Fernand Braudel. Quelles sont les idées, lessuggestions, les hypothèses qui, dans La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II comme dans Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme,continuent àoffrir d’utiles points de référence pour explorer certains desthèmes centraux dans les domaines que Braudel avait privilégiés ? Et commentcet exercice peut-il contribuer àune nouvelle approche de l’histoire globalede l’Europe moderne ?

In their magisterial work, Les Toscans et leurs families, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber examined in considerable detail a problem faced by many historians studying late medieval tax censuses such as the Florentine catasto: how much credence to give to the ages of individuals whose names are included in these documents? Following a lengthy investigation of the catasto of 1427-1429, they reached the wistful conclusion that “Tuscans in 1427 had only a vague knowledge of their own ages or were loath to report them accurately.“ In the course of their inquiry, Herlihy and Klapisch compared the ages of some individuals recorded in the catasto with the ages of the same individuals found in other documents.

Domenico di Leonardo Buoninsegni'sIstoria Fiorentina has served numerous historians of Renaissance Florence as a source for the political events which occurred in that city in the Trecento and Quattrocento. Being a narration of Florentine history from the Creation to the autumn of 1460 it has provided modern scholars with numerous details which, seemingly, offered fresh and original insights into the evolution of Florentine history, particularly for the later portion of the Istoria in which the events described coincided with the life of the author himself (b. 1384—d. 1465).

Unfortunately, since its first partial publication by Giorgio Marescotti in 1580 (reissued in 1581), Buoninsegni's Istoria has been subject to a series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations on one of which, ironically, has rested its reputation among scholars.

One of the minor points raised by Raymond de Roover in his valuable study on The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank deals with a document which he was unable to retrieve in the Florentine Archivio di Stato. First referred to by Giuseppe Canestrini in his pioneering study of Florentine fiscal history published in 1862, and subsequently cited and partly edited by numerous other scholars, such as Alfred Doren and Armand Grunzweig, this document, which seemed to have been lost since the reorganization of the Florentine archives in the first decade of this century, listed the names of Florentine citizens engaged in commerce, the name of the company of which each was a partner, a figure representing a tax assessment on the company, and the share of this tax which each of the company's partners was liable to pay.

Unlike the political history of Florence in the early and middle Trecento, the communal politics of the last two decades of the century have seldom been analyzed; the few existing attempts at analysis are couched in generalizations more applicable to the times of Dante than to those of Coluccio Salutati. Naturally, historians have been attracted by the more dramatic developments of the period, notably the city's foreign involvements, and the careers of the early humanists. Professor Hans Baron, the author of the most significant recent thesis on the character of the early Florentine Renaissance, has successfully fused the foreign and intellectual developments of the period into an original and most attractive synthesis by attributing the rise of civic humanism to the succession of military confrontations between Florence and Milan from the 1380's to the 1430's. And Eugenio Garin, obviously sharing Baron's conviction that humanism entailed much more than a search for new educational standards, has often argued that the protagonist of the late Florentine Trecento was Coluccio Salutati, the man who forged the ideal of umanesimo civile