MORE ELABORATE THAN THE livres de raison, the ricordi and ricordanze of the Florentine merchants and urban professionals shed precious light on some of the more intriguing questions in the study of agency. Thus, this chapter delves in greater detail into how culture and the social imaginary shape individuals’ agency: how one's personal values as well as ideas about social interactions lead to specific patterns of acting upon the world. A topic of particular interest is the codification of social knowledge so as to pass down to the family posterity successful patterns of agency. The second half of the chapter explores the other side of agency, from the seemingly passive resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, but which actually requires the mobilisation of considerable energy, to individuals’ decision to place their agency in abeyance. The patterns of agency discussed here reflect one of the most advanced late-fourteenth-century milieus: Florence was the continent's financial heart, a major hub of long-distance trade, and a republic in which thousands of citizens were coopted into communal governance but politics remained controlled by an oligarchy.

The ricordi and ricordanze's eclectic material covers business and family affairs as well as important events in the history of Florence; personal reflections were also included more frequently than in the livres de raison. Many of the notes open with a formula, ‘ricordanza sia’, ‘let it be recalled’, that echoes the wording of the entries in Benoist's livre de raison, ‘renembranssa sia’, and became so popular that it gave the name of the genre: ricordanze. While a distinction has been proposed between ricordi, construed more strictly as records or deeds of the kind transcribed or summarised in private cartularies and registers, and ricordanze, referring mainly to notes and memoranda to posterity, in practice the two terms were used interchangeably – a usage that is retained by modern scholarship. The ricordi and ricordanze have survived in much larger numbers than the livres de raison, proof that the practice of keeping such registers was more common in Tuscany than in Limousin and Provence. Around 1400, when the two texts analysed here were produced, the ricordi are clearly more elaborate than the livres de raison, with many including substantial narrative material, in contrast to the latter's itemised lists.