The Cantelowe Accounts: Multilingual merchant records from Tuscany, 1450-1451
The Cantelowe Accounts: Multilingual merchant records from Tuscany, 1450-1451
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Abstract
The mixed-language Cantelowe Accounts are found in the archives of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, hidden amongst thousands of medieval Italian documents. They were written by John Balmayn, an unknown Londoner, who travelled to Tuscany to oversee the sale of a valuable wool shipment in 1450-1451 on behalf of his master - the Mercer, Sir William Cantelowe. Balmayn methodically records all details of the delivery and purchase of over 20,000 gold florins' worth of English wool, sold to forty-four buyers in Pisa and Florence over a period of eleven months. The accounts offer the earliest evidence of an English merchant using Italian as a second language and a type of code-switching previously unseen in any published medieval source. The author uses an intriguing mix of four languages, combining Middle English, Latin and Anglo-French with the administrative Tuscan he learnt working alongside Florentine partners, such as the Salviati company. However, Balmayn's immersion in Tuscan mercantile culture is not limited to the lexical. The text's near total use of Arabic numbers (and modern fractional notation with a horizontal bar) is unparalleled in fifteenth-century English accounting and decades ahead of contemporary practice. Finally, Balmayn also provides unusually detailed descriptions of numerous new merchant marks which are used to identity the wool sacks in Cantelowe's shipment. Overall, the accounts are unique amongst multilingual medieval sources and of interest economic historians and historical linguists alike.
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