Italian writer of letters
Margherita Bandini Datini is known fTom her extensive surviving correspondence with her husband Francesco Datini (1335-1410). Margherita, of a dispossessed but elite Florentine family, married the self-made, extremely rich “merchant of Prato” in Avignon when she was sixteen and he forty-one. Once the couple returned to Italy, their relationship deteriorated, and they often moved separately between Prato and nearby Florence, writing daily about household, family, business, and politics. Their letters and many others providing information about Margherita are preserved in the Archivio di stato di Prato.
Margherita and Francesco’s core problem was a failure to have children. Margherita was considered at fault, since Francesco had illegitimate children, including two during the marriage (which did not help the relationship). Margherita compensated for her infertility through religious devotion and by striving to be the model of an intelligent and competent woman. She had charge of a large household, including apprentices, servants, and visitors, and in Prato she also dealt with Francesco’s ambitious building projects, farming, and business.
Margherita’s duties included writing letters to Francesco, and her relationship to letter writing is noteworthy for the continuum it demonstrates between illiteracy and literacy. Although evidence indicates that Margherita knew how to read and probably to write at an elementary level from the start of the correspondence, she dictated letters to scribes during most of her marriage. She used a Tuscan dialect untouched by literary concerns, but nonetheless, even in her earliest dictated letters, she prided herself on her talent for oral composition. Then, in the 1390s, when she was in her midthirties, she began to work on improving both her reading and letter writing, probably through intensive practice rather than formal lessons, and in 1399 she produced a spate of twenty-one surviving autograph letters. Her handwriting and placement of text on the page improved noticeably during this period, although her word usage and the way she organized the content changed little. After 1399, she returned to using scribes. She had achieved what she had set out to do, her health was poor, and she no longer cared about impressing Francesco.
Ann Crabb
See also the subheading Letter Writing (under Literary Culture and Women).
Bibliography
Primary Work
Datini, Margherita. Per la tua Margherita: Lettere di una donna del ‘300 al marito mercante. Prato: Archivio di stato, 2002. CD-ROM, with handwriting images.
Secondary Work
Origo, Iris. Merchant of Prato. Boston: David R. Godine, 1986. (Originally published in New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.)
World History
