Her brother-in-law, Ludovico Maria Sforza of Milan, wrote to Isabella in 1491 describing a shopping expedition in the rain comprising his wife and her cousin. To stay dry they were "wearing little woollen cloths, or headdresses over their heads." This not being the custom in Milan, women in the street "began to make villainous remarks," only to be roundly cursed by Ludovico's wife. He concludes: "I believe that when your Ladyship, who is so spirited, is here ... if any one dares to say villainous things to you, you will defy them all and give those women a real knifing!" Obviously sharp elbows were just the beginning in the fifteenth century.

In addition to shouting matches, shopping started and stopped to the sound of bells, as did many other rituals in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian towns. At first the bells marked the six canonical hours and the eight hours of the Virgin. Bells to signal civic obligations were simply added to the liturgical divisions of the day. Bell towers with clocks and sometimes automata activated by the changing hours were commonplace in most northern Italian cities by the end of the fourteenth century. To avoid confusion, different rhythms and differently tuned bells marked specific times of the day. To be heard by everyone, the bells had to be quite robust. Even so, in the fourteenth century those living on the outskirts of Treviso asked for an additional bell nearby so they would not miss anything. Amid this relative bedlam, silence was much prized, and that too was decreed by the authorities. In the fourteenth century the grocers' guild of Florence, for example, forbade members to attract customers in other shops by calling over to them. In Venice a decree in 1507 prohibited the sellers of hats and berets from leaving their stalls "to call out to anyone, or grab them by the hand or by their clothing."

The rules were probably suspended during the periodic fairs, some of which did impressive business. At a Naples fair held toward the end of the fifteenth century two resident Frenchmen sold a German five thousand hair combs and to a Genoese they sold twenty-five dozen pairs of scissors and fifty thousand pins. Auctions were definitely raucous affairs, announced by trumpet blasts or town criers, and once underway, bids were shouted. Often they were held to realize cash, satisfy debts, pay armies or servants, or benefit charities.

The values set on personal property were so different during the Renaissance that a tea towel would pay for a drink in a tavern and a set of handkerchiefs would pay the taxes, to borrow the author's examples. Pawnbrokers accepted the same sort of goods and were frequented without stigma by the rich and poor alike, attempting to mend their fortunes. The cultural historian concludes that auctions and the very popular lotteries "made the business of buying and selling, winning and losing into a very public piece of theatre. In demanding the viewer's attention, they served not only to shift household goods, gold and silver, but also to provide a moral message. As buyers and potential buyers witnessed the acquisition of second-hand carpets, clothing or buttons, they could learn the lesson of the transience of wealth as well as the price of old breeches, coral or gilt cups."

Contrasting the noble Castellani family in Florence with the patrician Priuli family in Venice the author details their frequent indebtedness to their grocers and their boatman, which neither demeaned their status nor raised that of their suppliers. Instead this fluid, casual mingling of classes and masses "provided an extremely powerful reinforcement to social order. Far from being a fixed event tied to a single space, 'the shop,' Renaissance buying practices were ... dependent as much on time, trust, social relations and networks as on the seemingly impersonal issues of price, production and demand."

The author illustrates her thesis with a wonderfully varied set of examples that almost convince the reader that he is on the spot.

Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600, by Evelyn Welch (Yale University Press, 800-405-1619), $45.00 (hardcovers).