The Merchant of Prato

Francesco di Marco Datini, the fourteenth-century Tuscan merchant who forms the subject of Origo's brilliant study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figures of the later Middle Ages ... paints, in brilliant and intricate detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance

The Times

As a picture of the daily round in Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron

Sunday Times