Hosted by: SIMS and Kislak Center
On October 2, 1466, Alamanno di Medici bailed out Salvestro da Palazzuolo from jail, where he had been imprisoned by the Otto di Guardia, the policing arm of the Florentine state. Although we do not know what Salvestro did to land himself in jail, his infraction—whatever it may have been—came at the cost of one fiorino largho, a rather hefty sum. Record of his imprisonment, the cost to free him, and an assertion that Salvestro would ultimately pay Alamanno back all appear in the Medici’s household leger, now held at University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center.
This small anecdote and the world of Florentine justice, economy, and social interaction that it evokes fills but four lines of the ledger’s nearly 250 folios, each of which contain up to 50 lines of accounting. The recorded expenditures reveal much more than one story of crime and punishment – here we see the day-to-day realities of child-rearing as the wet-nurse is paid, the math (abacco) teacher compensated, and clothing purchases made for Alamanno’s children. Familiar characters such as Mariotto the miller or Caterina the maid reappear in Alamanno’s payments to them over the years, and Alamanno’s wife Lena stars in her role as an important household actor as she pays the flour tax, purchases flax, or buys firewood.
The richness of these historical sources is hard to overstate, yet the many household ledgers that survive from the late Middle Ages remain largely untapped, in part because the manuscripts can be difficult to decipher and the writing lacks a narrative structure. However, historians are now reaching for new computer-based tools, including handwritten text recognition (HTR) programs, to transcribe these documents for easier access and analysis. Following a month-long fellowship at SIMS working with these materials, Laura Morreale will describe how to train HTR models to read difficult sources like the Italian financial records and will outline the costs, potential benefits, and risks of undertaking computer-based transcription for historical research.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Online Lecture Series presents regularly scheduled lectures related to the study of premodern manuscript books and global manuscript culture.
Laura Morreale is an Independent Scholar and cultural historian of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mediterranean with research interests in Italian communal historiographies and medieval French-language writings outside of France. She has served as a research associate in the Department of History and the Program for Medieval Studies at Harvard University for over ten years, and is the coordinator of Princeton's Middle Ages for Educators open-access resource publication platform. In 2022, she co-founded the ARC Humanities Press Digital Medieval Studies book series with co-editor Sean Gilsdorf; the third volume, Crusaders and Computers, appeared in 2026. Other recent collaborations include La Sfera/The Globe: Cosmology, Science, and Geography in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean (Italica Press, 2025) and the accompanying NEH-funded digital edition, and A Crusader's Death and Life in Acre: The 1266 Account-Inventory of Eudes of Nevers (Cornell, 2025) co-edited with Anne E. Lester.
Featured Image: Opening of household ledger from the Medici Archive (UPenn Ms. Codex 1321, fols. 7v-8r).