Matteo Pompermaier, “Credit and Poverty in Early Modern Venice,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52, no. 4 (March 7, 2022): 513–36.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is happy to announce this year’s recipient of the Article Prize on medieval or early modern Italian history to Matteo Pompermaier, for his article on “Credit and Poverty in Early Modern Venice,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52.4 (Spring 2022): 513-536. In this carefully reasoned and clearly written article, Pompermaier uses the records of property auctioned by the Giustizia Nuova to recover the material world and honor the stories of people who do not usually appear in the documentary record. By examining the credit services of Venetian inns and wineshops, which provided micro-loans and sold wine on credit against the pawn of simple household objects or items of clothing such as handkerchiefs, Pompermaier shows how possession of these commonplace material goods gave the working poor of eighteenth-century Venice access to credit. His genuinely interdisciplinary study will be of interest to cultural, economic, and political historians as well as historians of material culture.