This group of essays discusses texts and questions about medieval and early modern Italy; debates concerning money and morality (chapter 2); emotional bonds between fathers and children in the 1430s dialogues of Leon Battista Alberti and Giannozzo Manetti (chapter 3); humanist re-presentations of classical and vernacular narratives illustrating paternal feeling (chapter 4); paternal instruction on eating right (chapter 5); and domestic slaves, with whom their masters fathered children (chapter 6). They are bound together by the author's focus on what she interprets as contemporary debates among “merchants, humanists and mendicant preachers” concerning changing ideals and practices of fatherhood and the relation between household and community resulting from the new or developing mercantile economy (6–7).

Vitullo makes a welcome contribution to the study of the patriarchy that shaped the society and culture of Italian cities, especially Florence. Particularly interesting is her chapter on slavery, until recently a relatively neglected subject. Her commentary on Alberti and Manetti is, perhaps, the richest section in a volume replete with ideas and suggestions. Chapter 2 considers much-discussed examples of the case against usury based on Aristotelian-Thomist arguments about the sterility of money, and its countering with charitable donations by merchants such as Enrico Scrovegni, who in the first years of the fourteenth century appeared both in Dante's hell and Giotto's heaven, in the expiatory frescoes he commissioned for the Arena Chapel in Padua. More unusual visual texts include a mid-thirteenth-century mosaic of the merchant-saint Omobono, in San Marco in Venice, and the Veronese painter Caroto's ca. 1520 portrait of a child drawing a sketch of a stick figure, a fascinating unicum, as Vitullo claims, of the “intense interest in childrens’ play” displayed by the Mendicant friar Giovanni Dominici in his educational advice of ca. 1400 (76).

However, Vitullo's counterpoint between sterile merchants and fertile fathers often seems strained, dependent on extravagant interpretations of images or eccentric translations of texts. Thus San Bernardino's rebuke of Florentines, “L'abbondanza grande é segno di vostra sterminazione” (literally, “This great abundance is the mark of your destruction”), is rendered as, “This great prosperity is a sign of your sterility” (132). While linking commerce with fruitfulness, Donatello's female figure of Dovizia/Abundance with her cornucopia (and replicas of it) does not manifestly “portray merchants as fathers who provided new life for the city” (37). A very slightly darker-complexioned female countenance, unattached to identifying costume or accoutrements, is glimpsed at the edge of a family group painted by Ghirlandaio. Vitullo moves in one paragraph, without other evidence, from “if this portrait is a slave” to “the portrait of the Sassetti clan depicts enslaved women as justifiable forms of wealth . . . because their loyalty supports the lineage and, ultimately, through the heads of those households, the future of the greater Christian community” (158).

Since Vitullo's thesis concerns change and its causes, her imprecision about time is troubling. She generalizes from a handful of texts ranging from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, and attributes changing attitudes identified in these texts to the rise of a mercantile economy vaguely described as new, although in fact it was already developing in the eleventh century, and its values were widely asserted by the early Trecento. Discussing Alberti's and Manetti's treatises of the 1430s she even suggests that “the notion that men needed to avoid displays of emotion continued in the thought of important earlier writers such as Petrarch” (who died in 1374), whose “attitude toward grief rebukes the conclusion of Manetti's dialogue” (written in 1438) (91).

Negotiating the Art of Fatherhood appears in a series of multidisciplinary studies, but its strength lies in literary analysis. Vitullo takes too little account of economic, social, cultural, institutional, or even art history to tackle satisfactorily the problematic relation between society and representations of it. Unaided by fundamental studies of actual communities, especially on lineage, like those of Klapisch-Zuber, Trexler, F. W. Kent, and Dale Kent, Vitullo erroneously assigns the characters of Alberti, Manetti, and Acciauoli differing “social identities,” corresponding to different “emotional communities,” as proposed by Barbara Rosenwein, who herself emphasizes the difficulty of separating values from lived experience (97). Categorizing men as merchants or humanists or clergy or aristocratic protectors of land and lineage, especially when Leon Battista Alberti is a prime example of all of these, belies the complex texture of this society and its multiple determinants.