This article concerns a major work by Alberti in the tradition of treatises on household management. The first three books construct the ideal bourgeois domestic economy around the family; the fourth and last book shows that this ideal is being supplanted by the courtly model, whose centre of gravity is not the family but the court. But Alberti does not idealize the courtly life, as do most of the household treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Ricci, M. T., (2025), "De la famille marchande à la cour princière: I Libri della Famiglia de Leon Battista Alberti", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Ricci, Maria Teresa. "De la famille marchande à la cour princière: I Libri della Famiglia de Leon Battista Alberti." Renaissance and Reformation 37 (2): 2020. 55-65. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v37i2.8690. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.