Petrarch's War

William Caferro is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and Professor of Classics and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, Villa I Tatti in Florence and the Italian Academy at Columbia University and, in 2010, he received a Simon R. Guggenheim fellowship. He has written widely on medieval and Renaissance Italy, including Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (1998), The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (2001), John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy (2006), which won the Otto Gründler Award from the International Medieval Congress, and Contesting the Renaissance (2010).

'In Petrarch's War, William Caferro magisterially opens a window onto the complexities and unintended consequences of past lived experience, enlisting economic, military, literary, and social history into a densely contextualized snapshot of Florence in the aftermath of the Black Death. In this important book Caferro shows us how the war waged by Florence against the Ubaldini clan in 1349–50 is an integral part of a cultural mosaic that encompasses tesserae as diverse as soldiers' wages and the power plays of intellectuals.' Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University, New York

• Introduction: plague in context: Florence 1349–50; 1. Petrarch's war; 2. The practice of war and the Florentine army; 3. Economy of war at a time of plague; 4. Plague, soldiers' wages, and the Florentine public workforce; 5. The bell ringer travels to Avignon, the cook goes to Hungary: towards an understanding of the Florentine labor force, 1349–50; Epilogue: why two years matter (and the short-term is not inconsistent with the long-term).