¹ One of the strongest proponents of this thesis is Edward Shorter, who writes: “We can probably assume that men have always been avid for intercourse… But how do we explain this new eighteenth century willingness on the part of women to climb into the sack with them? … I believe it was the new access to paid employment… There was a close interaction between capitalist work, escape from traditional controls, and the wish to be free. It is the argument of this book that these things came together in the late eighteenth century …”; The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), pp. 260, 262–63Google Scholar.

² Ibid., pp. 66, 71,35–58.

³ David Herlihy, for example, claims that “cities generally acted as a brake upon demographic growth, as the urban environment discouraged marriages and procreation. This seems primarily to reflect the low economic value of women and children within the urban household. Much in contrast with rural areas, the urban wife and child made little substantial contribution to the productivity of their household and to the wealth of the city … ”; “Deaths, Marriages, Births, and the Tuscan Economy,” in Lee, R. D., ed., Population Patterns in the Past (London, 1977), p. 163Google Scholar.

⁴ “Limited land, limited jobs, limited hearths, and limited economic functions for the urban wife and child combined to halt demographic growth in Florence by the middle of the sixteenth century, and surely contributed to the city's decline…”; ibid.

⁵ Cipolla, Carlo M., “The Decline of Italy: The Case of a Fully Matured Economy,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser, 5 (1952), 184Google Scholar. According to Cipolla, guild and government regulations were the principal causes of high labor costs, but drastic population losses caused a further rise at a particularly crucial time for industry.

⁶ The two censuses are the Catasto of 1427 and the Censimento of 1631. The omissions and biases of the latter are similar to those of the Catasto, which have been masterfully analyzed in Herlihy, David and Klapisch-Zuber, Christine, Les Toscans et leurs families (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar.

⁷ The increased demand for luxury products in the seventeenth century is analyzed by De Vries, Jan, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 187–92Google Scholar.

⁸ The growth of the glass industry in the Renaissance and early modern period is described by Taddei, Guido, L'arte del vetro in Firenze e nel suo dominio (Florence, 1954)Google Scholar, and Ilardi, Vincent, “Eyeglasses and Concave Lenses in 15th-Century Florence and Milan: New Documents,” Renaissance Quarterly, 29 (1976), 341–60Google Scholar. Although no comprehensive study exists for majolica, evidence supporting expanding production is cited in Cora, Galeazzo, Storia della maiolica di Firenze e del contado, 2 vols. (Florence, 1973)Google Scholar, and Mallet, J. V. C., “L'importazione della maiolica italiana in Inghilterra,” Atti del V convegno internazionale della ceramica (Albisola, 1972), pp. 251–56Google Scholar. A major source of demand and encouragement for a wide assortment of luxury crafts ranging from furniture to musical instrument making was the Medici court. See Hammond, Frederick, “Musicians at the Medici Court in the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Analecta Musicologica, 14, Studien zur italienisch-deutschen Musikgeschichte, 9 (Cologne, 1974), 151–69Google Scholar; and Heikamp, Von Detlef, “Zur Geschichte der Uffizien-Tribuna und der Kunstschränke in Florenz und Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 26 (1963), 193–268Google Scholar.

⁹ As elsewhere in Europe, the Florentine wool cloth industry moved to the countryside in search of lower labor costs. By mid-seventeenth century rural Tuscany was producing over 10,000 pieces of cloth, not enough to make up fully for the decline in Florentine production, but sufficient to lead the Florentine guild to complain bitterly about the competition; Carmona, Maurice, “La Toscane face à la crise de l'industrie lanière: techniques et mentalités économiques aux XVI^e et XVII^e siècles,” in Produzione, commercio e consumo dei panni di lana (nei secoli XII-XVIII), ed. Spallanzani, Marco (Florence, 1976), pp. 154–56Google Scholar.

¹⁰ In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the wool industry employed approximately 12,700 workers in the city. By 1665 the number had fallen to 5,400. The silk industry that year employed 15,100 people. See Carmona, Maurice, “Sull'economia toscana del Cinquecento e del Seicento,” Archivio storico italiano, 120 (1962), 36–37Google Scholar, 43–44; idem, “La Toscane,” p. 159; and Jordan Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., London School of Economics, 1977), p. 69Google Scholar.

¹¹ In his pioneering analysis of the Italian economy in the seventeenth century, Carlo Cipolla states that by the end of the century all of northern Italy, including Florence, “had become an economically backward and depressed area; its industrial structure had almost collapsed, its population was too high for its resources, its economy had become primarily agricultural.” Citing Florence as an example, Cipolla singles out the decline in woollen cloth production, but he minimizes the industrial output of rural areas and believes that the silk industry also suffered a drastic decline; “The Decline of Italy,” pp. 178–79.

¹² Herlihy and Klapisch, Les Toscans, p. 583.

¹³ Carmona, “Sull'economia toscana,” p. 43.

¹⁴ The listing of wool workers by sex is incomplete since it only includes 1,242 workers, but the relative occupational breakdown within the industry seems accurate; therefore, the proportion of females listed most likely reflects the situation in the industry. Cf. Table 5 and Carmona, “Sull'economia Toscana,” p. 36.

¹⁵ Herlihy and Klapisch, Les Toscans, p. 583.

¹⁶ Florence, ASF, Miscellanea Medicea, 311, ins. 8.

¹⁷ Parenti, Giuseppe, Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prezzi a Firenze (Florence, 1939)Google Scholar; Fanfani, Amintore, Storia del lavoro in Italia dalla fine del secolo XV agli inizi del XVIII, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1959), pp. 339–45Google Scholar; Goldthwaite, Richard, “I prezzi del grano a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo,” Quaderni storici, 28 (1975), 15Google Scholar.

¹⁸ We do not have sufficient data on wage rates for different economic sectors to determine precisely the reasons for this sexual segregation but, interestingly, the piece rates paid weavers of both sexes did not vary for equal work. Differences did arise, however, in that women were employed more frequently in weaving cheaper, coarser cloths and were therefore less well paid. See ASF, Strozziane, V^a, 1716, 1720, 1739.

¹⁹ The shift away from the high quality woollen cloths produced earlier was noted by Romano, Ruggiero, “A Florence au XVI1^e siècle: Industries textiles et conjoncture,” Annales: E. S. C., 7 (1952), 511Google Scholar. For silk, see Goodman, “The Florentine Silk Industry,” pp. 49–53.

²⁰ Rapp, Richard T., Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)Google Scholar.

²¹ Lopez, Robert S. and Miskimin, Harry A., “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 14 (April 1962), 408–26Google Scholar; Cipolla, Carlo M., “Economic Depression of the Renaissance?,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 16 (April 1964), 519–24Google Scholar; Romano, Ruggiero “Italy in the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” in Earle, Peter, ed., Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (London, 1974), pp. 185–98Google Scholar; Furio Diaz, II Granducato di Toscana: I Medici, Vol. 13:1 in Storia d'Italia, ed. Guiseppe Galasso.

²² For a partial move in this direction, see Domenico Sella, “Industrial Production in 17th-Century Italy: A Reappraisal,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2nd ser., 6 (Spring/Summer 1969), 236Google Scholar. Fernand Braudel has also questioned the usefulness of the concept as he moved the onset of Mediterranean decline from 1620 to 1680 between editions of his work; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, 2nd. rev. ed. (London, 1973), Vol. 2, p. 1240Google Scholar.