Craft guild legislation and woollen production: The Florentine Arte della lana in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

The Late Medieval textile industry, especially the Italian one, has often been considered unable to adapt to market changes and lacking of innovation skills. It's a fact that the wool-making process didn't experience any substantial revolution at least until the Eighteenth century: the technology used by the Pratese workshop of Francesco Datini in making the woollen broadcloths at the end of Fourteenth century was basically the same adopted in producing the Florentine rasce two centuries later. A classic but still well valued hitoriographical theory used to blame the stiff rules implemented by the guilds. Naturally conservative, the guilds ended up blocking the activity of their members and making their products not competitive. Even if the debate on the role of craft guilds has experienced a revival during the last decade, the idea of the corporative institution as a hurdle to production is still firmly rooted. The Florentine Arte della Lana has been charged with the same accusations: the extensive guild's legislation produced from the Fifteenth to the end of Sixteenth century is full of warnings about “the good reputation of Florentine cloths”, to be protected at any risk, even that of neglecting process innovations. Therefore new applications were looked on as suspicious and were authorized only after a long time of experimentation and testing. Moreover, the willingness to protect some textile workers (mainly skilled workers such as weavers and, to a lesser extent, spinners) led the guild to fix minimum wages, thus worsening the low competitiveness of the Florentine products compared to those or their foreign rivals. However, the strategy of the Arte also let to some good results. A clear example is the role played by the guild in the process known as “garbizzazione of city's wool production”, as explained by Hidetoshi Hoshino (that is the shift towards the production of middle-to-high-quality cloths obtained by using not-English wool, generally called “di Garbo”). This change was, in fact, directly supported by the Arte which, in a time of crisis (the first half of the Fifteenth century), tried to revive the industry by introducing on the internal market new products made as an imitation of foreign textiles. Many protective measures set in the second half of the 15th century deeply affected the production choices of Florentine woolmakers, by forcing them to weave specific kinds of textiles as imitation of foreign cloths; by doing so they could acquaint with a whole series of medium-low quality products which would define the success of city's wool production in the second half of Sixteenth century. This paper aims to analyze the effects of the technical legislation issued by the craft guild over the Florentine woolmaking scene between the second half of the Fifteenth and the end of the Sixteenth century. Was it effective? Was it followed by the guild's members? Was it an hindrance to the development of the sector or, rather, did it allowed a more rational pattern of production?