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The Return of a Lost Ledger to the Selfridge Collection of Medici Manuscripts at Baker Library

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2011

Richard A Goldthwaite
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Extract

The Selfridge Collection of Medici manuscripts at Harvard Business School's Baker Library is the largest collection of Renaissance Florentine account books outside Italy. This collection documents both the business and personal economic activities of one branch of the Medici family through six generations, extending from the early fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century. It would be difficult to find, even in Florence, another family whose economic activities are so well documented over such a long span of time, a period we know as the Renaissance. This patrimony of family documents was sold by the Medici heirs through an auction at Christie's of London in 1918; and in 1927 the buyer, H. Gordon Selfridge, deposited the ledgers at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Around one hundred ledgers arrived at Harvard at that time, but one item in the Christie's inventory was missing. In 2007, I found this missing item in the catalogue of a Munich antiquarian book dealer, but it had already been sold to a private collector in Germany. When informed of its importance for the Harvard collection, the new owner of the ledger kindly permitted Laura Linard, director of Historical Collections at Baker Library, to have it microfilmed; and so finally, after eighty years, the missing item has returned, at least in a photographic version, to its original home, thereby completing the Selfridge Collection. This event could be the occasion for a reevaluation of a major collection of business documents too long ignored by historians.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Business History Review , Volume 83 , Issue 1: A Special Issue on Scandals and Panics , Spring 2009 , pp. 165 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © Harvard Business School 2009

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References

1 For these events, see the article “Original Manuscripts of the Medici,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 1 (Nov. 1927): 1–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the introduction to Randolph, GertrudeRichards, Bramlette, Florentine Merchants in the Age of the Medici: Letters and Documents from the Selfridge Collection of Medici Manuscripts (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), 3–19.Google Scholar

2 Richards, Florentine Merchants in the Age of the Medici.

3 The Glossary was published by the Medieval Academy of America in 1934 (repr. New York, 1970).Google Scholar On Edler, see Goldthwaite, Richard A., “Florence Edler de Roover (1900–1987): Nota Biografica,” in Florence Edler de Roover, L'arte della seta a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV, ed. Sergio Tognetti (Florence, 1999), xv—xxiii.Google Scholar

4 On de Roover, see Goldthwaite, Richard A., “Raymond de Roover on late Medieval and Early Modern Economic History,” in Business, Banking and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover, ed. Kirshner, Julius (Chicago, 1974), 3–14.Google Scholar

5 Florence Edler de Roover presented a brief overview of Francesco's career in “Restitution in Renaissance Florence,” in Studi in onore di Armando Sapori, 2 vols. (Milan, 1957), 2: 788–89Google Scholar; and some general observations about his local bank can be found in Goldthwaite, Richard A., “Local Banking in Renaissance Florence,” Journal of European Economic History 14, no. 1 (1985): 41 and 52.Google Scholar

6 Edler de Roover, “Restitution in Renaissance Florence,” 775–89.