Medieval Business History in America

In November 1927, Charles C. Eaton, librarian of Harvard Business School’s recently christened Baker Library, received a memo from N. S. B. Gras, who had earlier that year joined the school as its first Isidor Straus Professor of Business History. Gras wrote:

The Harvard men on the list included Frederic C. Lane, a likely candidate for Gras’s check mark, with an in-progress dissertation titled “History of Industry and Commerce of Venice in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” who would go on to become the doyen of Venetian economic historians.Footnote ¹⁶ Unfortunately, the check marks are not visible on the copy of Gras’s list, today held in Baker Library’s archives, so we do not know with certainty which two persons he suggested. But two scholars also on the list, who would ultimately come to work on “the Medici papers,” were not Harvard men or men at all. They were a Cornell woman, Gertrude R. B. Richards, who received her PhD in Philosophy in 1915, with a thesis on Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola; and a Chicago woman, Florence Edler, the subject of this article, who received her PhD in History in 1930 with a thesis on the silk industry of medieval Lucca. Edler would come to work directly with Gras, the “father of business history” in the United States, who shaped her career and that of her future husband, Raymond de Roover. Richards would work directly for the man who donated the “Medici papers” to Harvard Business School, the Anglo-American retail magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge. The intersection of these five lives—Selfridge, Gras, Richards, Edler, and De Roover—at Harvard Business School in the 1930s, and beyond, has much to tell us about the creation of business history as a discipline in the United States, and the important and still woefully underestimated role played by women in that discipline.

By the middle years of the last century, when the “commercial revolution” paradigm had coalesced into a coherent interpretive framework for understanding the origins of modern European economic development, the history of medieval Italian business was a flourishing field and an object of intense interest among economic and business historians.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1948, Yves Renouard, himself one of the key figures in articulating the contours of that paradigm, provided an overview of the field in a note that appeared in Annales, and placed in the top tier of historians of medieval Italian business Florence Edler de Roover, “well known for her excellent glossary of the language of business in medieval Italy,” alongside Armando Sapori, Robert S. Lopez, and her husband, Raymond de Roover. Renouard’s judgment, which would have been unremarkable at the time, is striking in retrospect, for while the latter three have remained central figures in the historiography of medieval business practices, Florence’s name has mostly receded from view.Footnote ¹⁸ Florence’s chief claim to fame then was, as Renouard noted, the Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business, Italian Series, 1200–1600, published in 1934 by the Mediaeval Academy of America in a planned (but never completed) slate of glossaries directed by Gras.Footnote ¹⁹

The need for such a glossary had become clear as early as 1927, when Selfridge entrusted with the Business School a large collection of Medici account books he had purchased at auction.Footnote ²⁰ Whimsically styled “Cosimo di Selfridge” by Fortune Magazine in 1933, Selfridge had a special affinity for the Medici and, according to his son, had “taken great pleasure in showing to his friends some of those old ledgers.”Footnote ²¹ He had also hoped to use the ledgers to learn more about the personal and business lives of the Medici, but they had proved so difficult to read and understand that he bet Nathan Isaacs, professor of business law at the Business School, $100 that nothing could be done with the manuscripts within a year of depositing them at Baker Library. After Selfridge visited the library and talked to excited faculty members, Eaton related that he was “very obviously surprised and pleased,” because “he thought they were nothing but show pieces, and kept telling us again and again we never would find any information of any value to anyone.”Footnote ²² In the short term, Selfridge was proved right and won the bet. Not even enough good material for a magazine story could be pulled together within a year, or, as Eaton put it:

Though he ultimately lost his bet, Isaacs laid out in a memo the rationale for studying half-a-millennium-old Italian account books at a twentieth-century American business school:

The years just before the onset of the Great Depression were heady and optimistic times for the discipline of business history, just as they were for American business; and Gras, the discipline’s chief proselytizer, would devote himself to making Isaacs’s reverie a reality.

On September 18, 1929, in a meeting in Cambridge of local members of the Mediaeval Academy’s large Advisory Committee on Research, Gras described the glossary project as “intended to lay the foundations for work in mediaeval business history, a study particularly suited”—for reasons that did not need to be articulated—“to American interest and aptitude.”Footnote ²⁵ Work on the glossary officially began on May 1, 1930. By the time of the committee meeting on November 3, 1930, held in New Haven, work funded by the American Council of Learned Societies was already well underway on the project, and Gras submitted a progress report and several sample entries completed by Florence. Gras defended the focus on Italian terms of business in much the same way Isaacs had—“[w]ith the spread of Italian methods of business, beginning in the Middle Ages, went Italian ideas and civilization”—and he described, in blunt terms that echoed Selfridge’s own despair at not finding the ledgers more than ornamental, the profound difficulties of the work:

Work on another book based on the Selfridge Collection—one that would more than amply testify to this difficulty—was already well underway when Gras submitted his report; namely, what would become Richards’s Florentine Merchants in the Age of the Medici: Letters and Documents from the Selfridge Collection of Medici Manuscripts, published in 1932 by Harvard University Press.

Gertrude Richards and the Florentine Merchants Debacle

Florentine Merchants has largely slipped into obscurity, and its publication was ultimately an embarrassment for the press because it required a lengthy (and far from complete) list of errata. The reviews were mixed, but the bad reviews were bad indeed. Citing absurdities like Richards’s claim that Luca Pitti “practically ruled Florence” from 1452 to 1460, the great Cecilia Ady argued that her introduction “betrays unfamiliarity with Florentine political life” and its modern historians. The Columbia dantista Dino Bigongiari, listing three pages of startling errors, decried the translations as “unintelligible” from the author’s “lack of a synthetic, living knowledge of the Italian language.” Following his lead, another reviewer suggested that Richards “exaggerated” the difficulty of the scripts used in the Medici documents and decried her “rather superficial acquaintance with the Italian language of the time.”Footnote ²⁷ Concluding with the damning judgment that “this work bears evidence of haste,” a prominent review in the American Historical Review summarized the unfortunate editorial afterlife of Richards’s book:

Given the enormity of Richards’s labors, and her obvious talent, reading the errata sheets today is a wholly dispiriting activity, from her opening excuse—that anything more than an “introduction” to the Medici manuscripts “would have been manifestly impossible” in the “eighteen months” she dedicated to the project—to her disavowal of the entire section on the “difficult, distinctly technical” articles of association and to her final, depressing erratum:

A photographic plate in Florentine Merchants allowed readers a single opportunity to directly compare a transcription and translation with an original; and those who were able and who took the time to do so could not rightly be chastised for losing all faith in Richards’s facility as editor. The manuscript itself is quite readable; the transcription, presented idiosyncratically if not erratically from a typographical viewpoint, and the translation are both full of rudimentary errors.Footnote ²⁹ Reviewing the book in Speculum, the young Harvard medievalist Allan Evans, then at work on his meticulous edition of Pegolotti’s fourteenth-century commercial guidebook, the Pratica della mercatura, could not have cut more deeply than when he wrote of Richards’s transcription that it “was clearly admitted to the volume by error, since it differs in many ways from its original,” and of her translations that they should be regarded as no more than “impressionistic.”Footnote ³⁰

Perhaps not surprisingly, Evans, nearby and with the requisite skill set, was brought in to help Richards, as is clear in the more than 120 pages of drafts and suggestions for the errata still extant. Indeed, one early draft of the opening statement for the errata mentioned with gratitude “especially aid from Dr. Allan Evans of Harvard University,” but this line was removed at Evans’s own request, perhaps, given how many errors would inevitably and embarrassingly remain. And some reviewers (including, apparently, American Historical Review reviewer Katherine Jeanne Gallagher) of the book seem to have received a note explaining that a “[s]urvey of significant passages by Miss Richards under Dr. Evans’ supervision” had been undertaken following the initial publication.Footnote ³¹ Armando Sapori, at the behest of Arthur Cole, then the administrative curator of Baker Library and who oversaw the preparation of both Florentine Merchants and its errata, had also been brought in to help Richards with difficult passages. Sapori, who was then working at the Florentine State Archive and who would go on to edit several important medieval Italian account books, provided corrected and modernized transcriptions. Richards herself translated the letter that Sapori sent back from Florence, along with his corrections, annotating it with what can only be called an apologetic running commentary, such as, “The abbreviation p^o found in many documents, signifies proprio or himself. After money it means, exactly that amount. (This was a point I had not been able to work out, although I knew what the term meant after a name GRBR).” But Sapori, describing the passages he was sent as “the most difficult Italian and difficult to put into modern terms of anything I have had to do,” was, unlike some critics—most notably Bigongiari—most sympathetic to Richards’s struggles: “The Medici did not express themselves clearly…. I quite understand the difficulty you have had to meet in this work, and I congratulate you most highly on your results.”Footnote ³²

Florence’s Glossary, to the contrary, as we will see below, was received well upon its publication in 1934 and has, as it were, aged well. In 1952, in Speculum, Lopez would, without hyperbole, describe the Glossary as “the pride of the Mediaeval Academy series” of books; and it has remained an important work of reference over nine decades after it was published.Footnote ³³ For its continuing value, the estimation of two of the most prominent premodern economic historians of the last half-century must suffice. Nearly forty years after its publication David Herlihy called it “still eminently useful”; and, just fifteen years ago, Richard Goldthwaite declared it “an extraordinary achievement for a young scholar at the beginning of her career, [which] has become the standard tool in use by economic historians of Renaissance Italy. It was prepared so thoroughly,” he noted—and thoroughly is precisely the right word—“that, after more than eighty years, no one has expressed the need for a new edition.”Footnote ³⁴

Florence Edler: The Formation of a Scholar

In summer 1938, the local Daily Journal announced that Florence Edler de Roover had been appointed associate professor of History at MacMurray College for Women in Jacksonville, Illinois, and it included a lengthy endorsement of the new faculty member by her University of Chicago adviser and mentor, the medievalist James Westfall Thompson, who was then finishing his long and distinguished career in Berkeley. “The foreign universities where she has studied, the archives in which she has worked, the itinerary of her travels, the bibliography of her writings,—all are impressive. She is,” he was quoted, “a rarely equipped and accomplished scholar.”Footnote ³⁵

Thompson’s words were drawn from his letter of recommendation, which had been submitted to MacMurray College as part of a credentials package assembled by the University of Chicago’s Board of Vocational Guidance and Placement, a package containing Florence’s recommendation letters from 1922 to 1938. Thompson’s full communication, with its rich superlatives and stunning final line, is worth quoting in full:

Some of the other letters included are as revealing of the vast differences between major research universities like Chicago and the high schools and women’s colleges at which Florence had taught, and of the ambient prejudices—gendered and ethno-religious—that had to be navigated in twentieth-century America. Elizabeth Fuller Jackson, associate professor of History at Agnes Scott College, for example, offered what was clearly intended as an unambiguously positive assessment:

Jackson, however, had prefaced these remarks with the observation that Florence is “not pretty or imposing in appearance but I consider her appearance her least favorable asset and it is not bad at all.” She added that she “looks somewhat Jewish—but she is not,” words offered apparently as a kind of necessary reassurance.Footnote ³⁷

Equally revealing, perhaps, is the long letter that Florence herself sent to the president of MacMurray College, describing herself and her habits:

It would be wrong to make too much of this, except to say that it serves as an index of the academic culture that Florence was navigating: a world in which a scholar of international reputation was nonetheless expected to account for her smoking habits, her churchgoing, and her proficiency at card games as part of her professional credentials.

The daughter of a successful Chicago wholesale tobacco pipe dealer who had emigrated in 1883 from Bielefeld, Germany,Footnote ³⁹ Florence Edler, born on December 14, 1900,Footnote ⁴⁰ received all of her postsecondary degrees at the University of Chicago: a PhB with Honors in Romance Languages and History (1920), a Master’s in English History (1923), and a PhD in History (1930).Footnote ⁴¹ And it was with Thompson that Florence appears to have received her grounding as a professional historian, taking his courses “Historical Criticism ‘Historiography,’” “Historians of the Nineteenth Century,” his three-quarter survey “Medieval History,” and special seminars (close to Thompson’s personal interests) on Galbert of Bruges and “Medieval Libraries.”Footnote ⁴² It was out of the lattermost course that Florence’s first publication, a short piece titled “The Monastic Scriptorium,” in the Jesuit quarterly Thought, emerged.Footnote ⁴³ The circumstances of Florence’s first trip to Europe, which brought her to Italy and war-shattered France, were auspicious. In summer 1921, at the beginning of her graduate studies, she took part in a University of Chicago delegation of thirty-seven young women sent to participate, as guests of the Italian government, in the commemoration of the sexcentenary of Dante’s death.Footnote ⁴⁴ Her subsequent travels brought her all across Europe, from Scotland to Turkey, and to North Africa. Indeed, except for a short period when she taught at Taos High School, in New Mexico, Florence spent most of the years from 1921 to 1926 studying and traveling extensively. Edler studied formally at the University of Toulouse in 1925, in its French-language institute “pour les étrangers” working chiefly under the medievalist Joseph Calmette. She wrote a “special report” on chroniclers’ attitudes to the Hundred Years’ War. She also worked informally at the University of Florence, where she audited courses in ancient and medieval history held by Luigi Pareti and the Russian émigré Nicola Ottokar, whose class-denying prosopographical approach to Florentine political history influenced generations of scholars.Footnote ⁴⁵ Florence taught European History at Agnes Scott College, a school for women in Decatur, Georgia, first as an instructor (1926–1927) and then as an assistant professor (1927–1929). Florence’s instructor position became open midterm, the college’s Alumnae Quarterly in November 1926 reported, when another faculty member “Miss Lady Coma Cole … was married very suddenly.” It also noted that “Miss Edler has just returned from a stay of several years in Europe, where she has practically completed work on her doctor’s degree.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Even given that in academia a phrase like “practically completed” tends to fall squarely in the theological “substance of things hoped for” category, this was not entirely true. Florence would return to archives in France and Spain to continue gathering material for her dissertation summers 1926 and summer 1928, and would spend 1929 and 1930 in Chicago completing her thesis.Footnote ⁴⁷

Compiling the Glossary

Within a year of Gras’s memo to Eaton (see Medieval Business History in America), Gras initiated a correspondence with Florence while she was teaching at Agnes Scott College. At first, Gras encouraged her to submit papers to the Economic History Review and to the Journal of Economic and Business History, just inaugurated and about to be published under his co-editorship, noting that although the new journal would focus on American enterprise it would nonetheless “welcome articles on the economic history of any country and for any period” and that it, personified, was “anxious to have contributions from the ablest of scholars, particularly the younger people.” On October 8, 1929, just weeks before the Black Thursday stock market crash and the Great Depression that would rein in his ambitions for business history at Harvard and ultimately doom his new journal (which ceased publication, under financial strain, in 1932), he wrote Florence, now back in Chicago from Georgia and living with her parents while completing her PhD dissertation under Thompson’s supervision, suggesting it might be possible for her to work with the Medici Collection or the Barberini manuscripts, both recently acquired by Baker Library. Her reply, along with a discussion he had in person with Thompson, whom he had recently seen, made Gras “very interested in [her] present research.” “I do not know just what work we have ahead of us or how it is to be arranged,” he told her, “but I should like to discuss the matter with you to explain such imperfect plans as we have.” Also on October 8, with these plans perhaps clearer in his mind, Gras wrote the Latinist Charles H. Beeson at the University of Chicago, with whom Florence had studied paleography, expressing an interest in hiring Florence for the position of “researcher in medieval business history” at Harvard Business School. Aware of the difficulties inherent in using the Medici manuscripts, which had disappointed Selfridge and befuddled Richards, Gras asked Beeson:

We can assume that Beeson’s assessment (like Thompson’s) was positive, because Florence was soon living in Cambridge and working on the Medici documents under Gras’s direction—and her work over the next decade would reveal a truly remarkable facility with medieval and Renaissance business records.Footnote ⁴⁸

Florence’s work on the Glossary at the Harvard Business School overlapped with the end of Richards’s completion of Florentine Merchants.Footnote ⁴⁹ Gras had created there, around his Business History group, a lively and stimulating intellectual environment, for both its members and a steady stream of visitors, often from Europe, all of whom attended routine luncheons and seem to have had constant interactions with each other and with Gras, his then-assistant Henrietta Larson, his secretary, other Business School faculty and Baker Library staff. In an interview conducted just before his death at the age of nearly one hundred, the great accountant and scholar William T. Baxter recalled meeting both Florence and another female researcher (likely Richards, but possibly Larson) in 1932:

In the second half of the next year, the thirty-year-old Henri Laurent, who was then finishing work on his important book on the Flemish cloth trade in France and Eastern Spain, visited the business school as a Belgian Advanced Fellow of the Educational Foundation of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), a food relief group organized during the First World War by Herbert Hoover, which supported a number of charitable and educational causes.Footnote ⁵¹ Laurent was startled by the abundance of medieval sources at Widener and Baker—“My surprise was great, and agreeable, to discover, on the other side of the ocean, important new resources to complete [the] documentation of a book of mediaeval economic history!”—and he fondly recalled being “in every-day and intimate touch with Professor Gras and his associates,” among them Arthur Cole and “Miss Larson.” The description of Gras’s operations contained in Laurent’s postvisit report, written in a charmingly non-native English, to the CRB is striking:

Laurent would also single out the help he received from “a young instructor of Harvard, Mr. Allan Evans,” who allowed him to use the manuscript of his in-progress edition (a work “destined to make, so to say, [a] sensation in circles of economic history”) of the fourteenth-century Florentine merchant Pegolotti’s important guidebook called the Pratica della mercatura. He also commented on Florence.

Florence herself would describe the activities of Gras’s group, about which she had nothing but the “most pleasant feelings” not long after she left, and Gras would repeatedly send the group’s “collective good wishes.”Footnote ⁵³

It is clear that Gras’s program, though in quintessential ways, an American one, was also sending vibrations back out into the wider world and to Europe. In the 1930s, Italy was at the forefront of the discipline of premodern economic history, and with people like Sapori in business history. “Certainly more books on medieval and Renaissance economic history are being published [in Italy] than in any other single country,” Florence told Gras. When she met the economic historian Gaetano Corsani, she “was surprised to learn that he knew all about the publications of the Harvard Business School” and even hoped to be able to someday spend some time in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁴ These vibrations, of course, also reached Belgium, the land of Pirenne. “For a number of years,” Raymond de Roover would tell his future adviser, while still in Antwerp, “I have followed the development of the new subject of business history in the States, as best I could at such a distance.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Looking back in 1935, as the first copies of the Glossary were arriving in Europe, on her then long-finished work, Florence would recall it as “an all-absorbing task” taking up “almost four years … [of which] it took many months to develop the technique of this particular kind of glossary-making, and many more months to do the reading which was necessary as a background for the work.” She would also remember how she “caused various members of the administration some worry by [her] habit of working late in [her] office so much so that she was willing to ‘sign a pledge not to work late at the library,’” should she return to the Business School. By “particular kind” of glossary, Florence meant one with “citations long enough to be of value to economic and business historians” that could itself “serve as a source book,” while also serving “as a key to the meaning of terms found in published and unpublished documents.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In July 1930, early in the process of compiling the glossary, Florence spoke with David Thomas Pottinger, assistant director of Harvard University Press and its principal book designer, and showed him specimens of her work in order to learn how to format and type the printer’s copy on stiff cards for each entry.Footnote ⁵⁷ In June of the same year, work on the Glossary (“a new study … begun by Dr. Florence Edler”) had already been announced in the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society in what amounted to yet another mission statement on why pre-modern Italian business records, like the ones recently donated to the Business School by its business-magnate patrons, mattered:

The Barberini collection, dating from 1630 to 1818, would ultimately fall outside the Glossary’s chronological scope (1200 to 1600), and Florence would admit, “I cannot say anything about the Barbarini documents. I have never examined them carefully enough.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As we have already seen, the Business School had good reason to be concerned about justifying Selfridge’s donation, but, by the time the Glossary was complete, “abundantly justified” would not be hyperbole.

In fall 1931, the Mediaeval Academy of America published a fifty-six-page staple-bound booklet of “Selections from Part I” (i.e., from the dictionary rather than the appendices), which had been directly “planographed” from Florence’s typescript by Boston’s Spaulding-Moss Company, experts in photostatic and offset printing. As long as supplies of the “Selections” lasted, they were offered to experts in the hopes of receiving comments, corrections, and suggestions.Footnote ⁶⁰ More than three years would pass between the publication of this booklet and Florence sending her final typescript to press in spring 1934. During this time, the Glossary grew substantially in size. For example, the booklet included fifty-two keywords starting with the letter “A,” which was a bit under nine pages, while the final Glossary defined 124 “A” letter keywords over twenty pages. But a comparison of the two printings makes clear that Florence had, already in her first year of work, settled on the format and mastered working methods she would employ in constructing the Glossary.

In a short preface, Gras laid out both the rationale—“[e]xtract[ing] bits of information here and there” from medieval business records is easy, but a “fuller understanding” of such documents requires the “study of individual terms”—and the plan for a series of glossaries of medieval business terms:

Although Florence’s would be first, other glossaries were already planned: Eugene H. Byrne and his student Robert Reynolds, both representatives of what would come to be called the “Wisconsin School” of economic history, would produce one of medieval Latin business terms; Allan Evans would work on coins and money.

If requesting the aid of “competent scholars” was, indeed, the chief objective of releasing the booklet, it was certainly achieved. Although the “Selections from Part I” filled only fifty-six small typewritten pages, the review of them that appeared in the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte by Wilhelm Silberschmidt—who had made pioneering contributions to the study of the commenda contract in the late nineteenth century—occupied seven. Precisely because Florence’s project is “so meaningful and, for the study of economic history and commercial law, so important,” Silberschmidt argued, “what exists now … is seriously lacking and would gain a great deal from the improvements proposed” in his review essay. He wanted more terms—noting the vast richness of Doren’s vocabulary of the Florentine wool industry compared to Florence’s, and listing coins that had been left out, for example “perperi and hyperperi, massamutini and marabotini”—and, crucially, he wanted more contextual details of the sort that could be better provided by secondary literature than lengthy quotations from manuscripts. Releasing the glossaries in pre-publication fascicules was, Silberschmidt thought, the right editorial course of action, and “all experts should be asked to submit comments and suggestions” to avoid “errors and omissions in the final product.”Footnote ⁶¹ Silberschmidt, in his review of the completed glossary, recognized that Florence’s was “pioneering work” but remained unhappy about many of the specifics, and made special note of the fact that the success of the requests for help from experts was not mentioned in the preface of the book. “At least [Alessandro] Lattes’s in-depth explanations … were deserving of thanks,” he added, referring to the prominent professor of commercial law’s helpful review, and almost certainly feeling the same way about his own.Footnote ⁶²

In addition to forty of the Medici manuscripts held at Baker Library, which she used throughout the Glossary, Florence drew citations for the definitions from more than 150 other printed and manuscript sources, reflecting a vast program of reading in the available material for medieval Italian business history. Florence did not, though, work entirely alone. Manuscript citations were supplied by Robert Brun, since 1926 librarian of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, who had worked extensively in the Datini Archive in Prato; and by Armando Sapori, whom Florence described in 1933 as “the man who knows the most about my special field of interest—Italian industrial and commercial history based upon the use of mercantile account-books.”Footnote ⁶³ A translated article by Brun on Datini had appeared in Gras’s short-lived Journal of Economic and Business History in 1930, and both Brun and Sapori were part of Gras’s network of European colleagues. And Florence called both “my collaborators” in the introduction to the Glossary.Footnote ⁶⁴ Figure 7 shows the ten most commonly used sources for citations in Florence’s work, expressing their usage in the definitions section relative to the Medici manuscripts; these are the sources that dominate the Glossary’s scholarly apparatus and, in a few cases, rival or exceed even the Medici manuscript in number of total citations.

Figure 2.

Raymond Adrien de Roover (1904–1972). Courtesy of Boston College. See online supplement, 6, for an additional image of Raymond.

Figure 3.

Manuscript 496 in the Selfridge Collection. The libro debitori e creditori of Giovenco d’Antonio and Giovenco di Giuliano de’ Medici for a 1431–34 wool partnership. Note: At left, f. 2r, the first folio with entries. (Source: Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School.)

Figure 4.

Norman Scott Brien Gras (1884–1956). Courtesy of Baker Library Special Collections. See online supplement, 7, for an additional image of Professor Gras.

Figure 5.

Florence, five years old, in 1906, and Florence as a young woman. Courtesy of Kathleen Elizabeth Allison. See online supplement, 1–5, for additional photographs of Florence and her family.

Figure 6.

Education, travels, research, and academic appointments of Florence Edler de Roover, 1920–1938. Cartography by Isabelle Lewis.

Figure 7.

Weighted usage of the most important sources in the Glossary. Visualization by Matthew W. Norris. Note: Values represent relative citation frequencies normalized to the Medici manuscripts from the Selfridge Collection (set to 1.00). Sources: Datini manuscripts in Prato [references supplied by Robert Brun]; Francesco Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura [Allan Evans’s unpublished edition]; Luca Pacioli, Summa de arithmetica (Venice, 1494); Giorgio Chiarini, Libro che tracta di mercatantie (Florence, 1481); Bardi, Peruzzi, and Tolomei manuscripts in Florence [references supplied by Armando Sapori]; Alfred Doren, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie (Stuttgart, 1901); Enrico Bensa, Francesco di Marco da Prato (Milan, 1928); Legislazione toscana, 32 volumes, ed. Lorenzo Cantini (Florence, 1800–1808); Statuti … di Pisa dal XII al XIV secolo, 3 vols, ed. Francesco Bonaini (Florence, 1854–70); and Gregorio Dati, Libro segreto, ed. Carlo Gargiolli (Bologna, 1896).

Gras’s preface to the Glossary noted that Sapori had “been prevented by circumstances from completing his task,” so, had things worked out as planned, it is possible that the number of citations contributed by Sapori would have been much greater. In summer 1935, Sapori asked Florence to convey his apologies to Gras “for the little work he had done for the Glossary,” explaining that “[h]is mother was ill a long time when he should have been sending me material and he had his new work as Professor [at Bocconi] in Milan where he spent three days a week and in Florence where he taught in the School of Commerce.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Sending citations was not, though, the only role played by Italian economic historians like Sapori. In spring 1932, Florence traveled to Italy to work on the Glossary and to consult with scholars about “definite problems in regard to certain terms.” “In conference with men like [Alessandro] Lattes and [Gino] Luzzatto [in Genoa and Venice, respectively],” Florence would write, “and in weeks of daily contact with Armando Sapori in the Florentine archives I learned much that I needed to know that could not be found in print.”Footnote ⁶⁶ After Brun and Sapori, the most important of Florence’s collaborators was Allan Evans, who shared his unpublished edition and translation of Pegolotti and read and criticized “the entire manuscript of the Glossary,” and who would continue to work together with Florence through the 1930s.

In preparing the Glossary, Florence worked with manuscripts in Florence and Lucca and in the University of Illinois’s Antonio Cavagna Collection, but most of her work was done at Baker and Widener Libraries and with Selfridge’s Medici manuscripts. In 1933, while finishing her pre-press work on the Glossary, Florence described having given a “cursory examination [to] over one hundred account-books in the Selfridge collection,” and of having been “merely able to tap the Medici sources, picking out terms here and there for use.” In October of the same year Arthur Cole reported to Gras that Florence wished to have “some twenty of the Medici volumes at hand” and, given the difficulty of bringing them in and out of Baker’s vault each day, suggested having them moved to Widener’s “treasure room” because “much of [Florence’s] work must be carried on in that main building.”

In February 1932, Florence had described, with characteristically minute attention to detail, her working methods in a letter to Robert Reynolds, then at work with Eugene Byrne, on the complementary glossary of Latin business terms.

Reynolds, for his part, reported “slow but steady work,” also with the help of Hilmar Krueger, on the Latin glossary in October of the same year. Four years later, Reynolds wrote Gras to confirm that the project would never be completed, suggesting something of the herculean task that Edler completed more or less alone.Footnote ⁶⁸ The glossary of coins, too, to which Florence contributed, was never brought to completion either, interrupted by Allan Evans’s service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and then his long career in the State Department. See online supplement, 8–9, for appendices visualizing the development of a single Glossary entry and the making of a Glossary appendix.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Reception of the Glossary

The debacle that followed the publication of Florentine Merchants, necessitating the release of extensive but far from complete errata, cast a shadow even over the publication of Florence’s Glossary. Early in 1935, Florence added a second postscript to one of her letters to Gras to note that three errors had thus far been found in her book, two of them by Evans. “They are such inexcusable ones, that I wonder how many more there are.” That a few simple lapsus calami or typographical errors (like a missing decimal point or incorrectly written fraction) should appear in a technical book of well over 200,000 words, mostly patched together from medieval passages from a vast range of sources, seems far from “inexcusable,” as Gras made clear in his comforting reply: “Don’t worry too much about minor slips in the Glossary. I should think 10,000 errors per volume would not be excessive.” Florence also seemed resigned to receiving negative or at least argumentative reviews; “the reviewers,” she told Gras, “will probably differ from many definitions…. The only ones whose comments I particularly value are those of the Italians like [Gino] Luzzatto,” one of Italy’s foremost medievalists and economic historians, then in his late fifties and already a magisterial figure. Obviously pleased with his first review, when it finally appeared, Florence clipped it and mailed it to Gras. The Glossary, Luzzatto wrote, “constitutes a precious contribution to the study of our medieval economic history for which we should give thanks to Prof. Gras who took the initiative for the work and signorina Edler who sustained it with so much diligence and intelligence.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The pressing need for such a glossary was also presented succinctly in a subsequent and equally laudatory review by Luzzatto. Though the seventeenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries of Du Cange and Giulio Rezasco, respectively, covered medieval political and administrative terminology well enough, there existed no comparable work for economic and business terms. He wrote:

Though intended for foreign scholars, Luzzatto noted,

Another giant of Italian historiography, the economist Luigi Einaudi, and the future president of Italy, reviewed the Glossary along with three articles by Florence in the economic history quarterly that he would edit until 1943. In his review, also framed by the inadequacy of existing dictionaries, he mixed effusive praise of Florence with scorn for his fellow Italians:

Florence had indeed received help from others (like Alessandro Lattes) besides Sapori in Italy, who indeed had not been able to entirely fulfill his commitments to the project, but the pre-print of glossary entries the Mediaeval Academy had distributed gratis and advertised in Italian journals had not produced the sort of feedback Gras and Florence had hoped.Footnote ⁷³ And Einaudi’s critique of his countrymen only sheds more light on the—ultimately mostly solitary—work that Florence did.

One of the earliest reviews—and one notably free of any criticism—of Florence’s Glossary appeared in March 1935 in La Vie économique et sociale, a journal published by the Institut supérieur de commerce Saint-Ignace, the Jesuit business school in Antwerp where the reviewer, one of the city’s native sons, had himself completed his licentiate in 1924 before beginning a career first as an accountant and executive with the city’s largest shipping firm, the Agence Maritime Internationale, and then, by fits and starts, as a historian. The reviewer was none other than Raymond de Roover, thirty years old at the time, whom Florence had met only two months earlier. Properly describing the Glossary as “the fruit of long and patient compilation work,” of which he had of course heard from Florence, Raymond ended his review with a lovely flourish: “Miss Edler has enriched historiography with an indispensable working tool. As a reference work, her book is destined to render invaluable services. It is a masterpiece of erudition that deserves only expressions of praise.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Already when he wrote this, the clearly smitten Raymond was not an objective reviewer, but his judgment has been proven true by the intervening decades of scholarship. Raymond may, at this early stage, have already envisioned a future in which Florence herself would “render invaluable services,” well beyond those possible for a glossary, to his scholarship and he to hers.

Few reviews were quite as positive as Raymond’s, but most were positive. Though noting that it provided “the best documented vocabulary of [medieval business] terms available in any language,” containing many words and meanings not found in the Crusca or Tommaseo, Abbott Usher, whom Florence knew from Harvard, heaped special praise not on the glossary entries themselves but on the volume’s appendices, “an extensively documented introduction to the Medici papers in the Selfridge Collection,” calling the one on bookkeeping “no less illuminating than the more imposing monographs of Sieveking and Weitnaur.” Usher’s opinion of how the Glossary would be used by anglophone scholars does not seem to have been borne out by time, but it is worth quoting:

Michael Postan, who would go on to become the dean of English medieval economic historians, had more quibbles, but recognized them as quibbles:

Postan was not alone in pointing out that Florence, for the most part, labored alone to produce the sort of volume that was usually a collaborative or institutional production. The French jurist and historian Roger Picard, who would soon be forced into exile in New York by antisemitic laws under the Vichy regime, provided a short but glowing summary of that work:

Other reviewers, in what must also be seen as a kind of praise, refused to accept that Florence had mostly compiled the Glossary alone. “To handle the mass of material, several collaborators assisted E[dler],” wrote Karl Pivec, “so that the glossary can rightly be considered the product of the joint work of several individuals.”Footnote ⁷⁸ At the other end of the spectrum was Marc Bloch, who reviewed the Glossary for Annales. Although not without expressing some pointed criticisms, he noted that “the abundance of commentaries and quotations transforms some of the entries into veritable small scholarly dissertations,” and offered Florence what is, all things considered, truly astonishing praise:

Not all reviews at the time, though, were so positive.

Dino Bigongiari, who had savaged Richards’s Florentine Merchants, was also not kind to Florence. Only if the scope of the dictionary had been significantly reduced, he argued, “should it then be possible to obtain a thoroughness, a technical competence, and a philological exactness … unfair to demand of the work as it now stands.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Gras wrote Florence about the review immediately: “I saw a very unsatisfactory example of a review … in the American Historical Review by an Italian, apparently connected with Columbia. It was just a piece of sniping and not a balanced statement.” Florence replied that she had once had lunch with Bigongiari, adding, “He is noted for his disagreeable reviews, so I did not expect a favorable one…. Dr. Eileen Power [then professor of economic history at the London School of Economics] mentioned the review when Raymond and I had tea with her in London. She said it was the kind one expects a linguist to write,” one, she presumably meant, consumed with philological and etymological minutiae.Footnote ⁸¹

While Gras was reassuring Florence, a flurry of activity was happening behind the scenes. G. W. Cottrell, Jr., in his capacity as executive secretary of the Mediaeval Academy, likely at Gras’s insistence, wrote directly to Henry Bourne, the editor of American Historical Review, with a numbered list of pointed responses to some of Bigongiari’s “unjustified” criticisms, concluding, “It is evident that the removal of these non-valid criticisms from the review would have produced a very different impression of Dr Edler’s book. The Academy would appreciate very much any correction of this erroneous impression which it might be possible to make at this date.”Footnote ⁸² Acknowledging he lacked any “expert knowledge on medieval Italian,” Bourne agreed with Cottrell in principle and offered to print Cottrell’s response: “I am not particularly fond of controversies between reviewers and reviewed but it seems that the review has given a wrong impression.”Footnote ⁸³ Bigongiari, in turn, replied to Cottrell’s letter, which Bourne forwarded to him in New York.Footnote ⁸⁴ Here is the exchange on one of the points in Bigongiari’s review:

Cottrell ultimately thanked Bourne and agreed to “let the matter rest” after Bourne encouraged him to do so on the grounds that “all the readers of the Review, with the exception of a very few specialists, would be unable to judge as to the merits of the case.”Footnote ⁸⁵ And also Bigongiari, for his part, had offered something like an apology:

Belgium and Marriage

Early in 1935, Florence wrote to Gras to say that she had been invited to attend that year’s anniversary meeting of the Royal Historical Society (RHS), to be a guest one evening of Eileen Power for several days at her London home, and to dine there with her and the economic historian Michael Postan, Power’s former research assistant and future husband. “I shall also try to see Mr. Selfridge, Sr. to autograph the copy of the Glossary which he has probably received and if he invites me, to see the Medici Mss. which he has in his home.” After the RHS meeting, she wrote Gras again to describe her stay with Power and the visit she paid to Selfridge. It is worth quoting the latter part at length:

Florence’s understanding of Richards’s arrangement with Selfridge is borne out by the evidence that remains of it, including correspondence with Selfridge himself and his private secretary concerning payments that Richards was receiving for translations and other work. Just before Christmas 1934, Selfridge wrote to Richards about a check he had sent her and added, “At present of course we are going through a very busy time. When I get a little more leisure I will study the translations more carefully and see if I can build the story of Cosimo’s domestic and commercial life.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Richards would again come up in the Gras–Edler correspondence nine months later when Gras wrote Florence with news:

The implication that Gras hoped someday to be capable of supporting Florence’s further research with the Medici and Barberini collections at Baker would not have been missed by Florence, for whom Richards was in some ways a competitor, and her reply seethes with contempt for Richards and her work:

Although Florence is often refreshingly open with Gras in sharing her views of other scholars, the spitefulness of her comments is wholly uncharacteristic, suggesting that this exchange must be read in an ephemeral context, now long lost; namely, that of the two correspondents’ private conversations in Cambridge, conversations in which the failings of Florentine Merchants were a prominent topic along, perhaps, with Selfridge’s personal patronage of Richards.

Florence’s personal frustrations with Richards, encouraged by Gras, also doubtlessly emerged from differences more deeply embedded in their scholarly formation and historical weltanschauungen. These differences are hinted at in one of Florence’s comments to Gras when reporting that, after only two weeks in the Antwerp archives, she had found the Van der Molen letters and was in the process of cataloging and transcribing them, she wrote: “I do not want to make the mistake of publishing letters which are of interest but not really valuable because the account books which would explain much in the letters are missing, as they were in the case of the letters Dr. Richards published.”Footnote ⁹⁰

As her work on the Glossary was coming to an end, Florence wrote her Chicago mentor James Westfall Thompson about her future plans. Her attitude, apparent also in other letters, was one of confidence in her own fortune, that things would work out, and of a kind of nonchalant resiliency that she would be fine even if they did not:

She would later tell Gras, at a similar moment of uncertainty, that “Fortune always seems to smile upon me. My father used to say that I was born under the luckiest star in the heavens. I have as yet no reason to doubt it.” Her confidence would prove well-grounded. Henri Laurent had encouraged her to apply for a CRB fellowship and, though her feelings about doing so were mixed (on the one hand, part of the year would have “to be spent in damp Belgium”; on the other, she wanted to get to know the great Henri Pirenne and to spend time with Laurent and “his American wife”), she applied and won a fellowship.Footnote ⁹¹ After revising the proofs for the Glossary, Florence made her way to Belgium, where the course of her life would be profoundly changed.

Gras wrote Florence in Antwerp soon after her arrival and asked her to gather information on Belgian economic historians, in part explicitly to “make connections there” in case his defunct journal should one day be re-established. At the start of 1936, Florence shared news, at considerable length, of one of the economic historians she had met; “his name,” she wrote, “is Raymond de Roover (pronounced just like the English word, ‘rover’Footnote ⁹²)” and “he is today the authority on the history of accounting and account-books in Belgium.”

The letter, brimming with details of this sort about Raymond and his work, seems designed to spark Gras’s interest in him for a future that Florence was already envisioning: “I have put the idea into his head that he should try to get a year’s leave of absence soon and apply … to go to the Harvard Business School and work with you.”Footnote ⁹³ Within weeks, Florence had sent copies of Raymond’s work to Gras, explaining: “The reason that I am eager for you to see the work… is that [Raymond] would like to come to Harvard next September perhaps as an assistant to Gras” (or to Windsor Arnold Hosmer, a professor of Accounting at the Business School, who, like Gras, had a wide-ranging interest in pre-modern account books), or even “to stay long enough to work for a doctorate.” In another expression of her confidence, if not in “Luck” then in Gras’s position and concern for her, she added: “I am sure that if there is any possible way of getting him over to Harvard you will think of it.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Although the route was indirect and Gras, Edler, and De Roover together considered a number of options before figuring out how to get Raymond to America after Florence first wrote to Gras, Raymond de Roover chose finally to enroll in the MBA program at the Harvard Business School.Footnote ⁹⁵ “It is because I believe that he has a ‘flair’ for Business History, much more so than I have,” Florence told Gras, “that I am so eager to have him study under you.”Footnote ⁹⁶ And he ultimately did.

The intervening months had witnessed Edler and De Roover’s courtship and marriage in London on May 4, 1936. A newspaper story written nearly a decade later, obviously with input from Edler de Roover, cast their first meeting and wedding in a light befitting what she called her “hopelessly romantic” sensibilities: they had met “under the eaves of the attic of the Antwerp city hall where the archives … are housed.”

More pressing than the issue of Florence’s papers, it seems, were worries about Raymond leaving his mother in Belgium, especially after the death of his only sister from cerebral meningitis on November 11, 1935; a lack of financial resources; and ill-defined plans for the future.Footnote ⁹⁸

On September 25, 1935, Florence sent Gras a long letter telling him of her plans to marry. “I have been hesitating for some time to write you because I feel self-conscious about announcing another engagement,” she wrote, and “[a]mong my friends I have not yet lived down my reputation for fickleness.” Perhaps precisely because of this reputation, and her age, Florence spent much of the letter methodically explaining why she thought she and Raymond should marry and how they might survive financially together in Cambridge. They had used her long research trip to Italy (April to August 1935) away from Raymond to see if “what we took for love might be merely intellectual interest plus propinquity,” and were considering a number of funding options, among them Gras finding more money for work on the Medici manuscripts.Footnote ⁹⁹ Understandably, most difficult for Raymond to accept was his being entirely dependent on Florence or her parents, even though he would have been happy to accept a “dowry from the father of any woman he might marry.” Florence uncharacteristically wrote, “I shall await your reply with eagerness,” but could not have been other than deeply disappointed by Gras’s next letters, especially since she had told him that, to her, “for two people already over 30 years of age to postpone marriage indefinitely … seems … rather cowardly and psychologically and physiologically unwise, especially when they are not interested in starting a family.” Gras replied in mid-October, prefacing his letter with these words: “I received your very welcome letter and read it with care. I note the important issues involved but shall not on this occasion attempt to deal with them all.” Although Gras would welcome Raymond, he explained, there was “no chance” of him getting a scholarship and “at present no chance of finding or creating any post of archivist or researcher in the School of Business,” a situation that would remain “for at least a few years,” presumably due to the same financial troubles that killed his journal. Five days later, Gras wrote again to Florence, this time prefacing his letter with these words: “I hope I did not leave you with the impression that Mr. De Roover would not be welcome at the School of Business. My thought is just the contrary.” But as for the proposed marriage, Gras wrote:

Florence’s decision to marry Raymond seems to have flustered Gras, so much so that it took two letters to even begin to formulate his ideas about her future, and then to do so in fits and starts not at all typical of the professor.

Gras likely understood that marriage would inevitably mean a diminishment of Florence’s career in the field of business history and future as a scholar. When Florence decided to extend her CRB Fellowship in Belgium by offering to compile a second glossary, this time of medieval Flemish business terms, Gras agreed to recommend Florence for the project on the basis of her “feeling for exactitude in economic terminology … [and] habit of finishing what [she] undertake[s],” but he did not seem happy to do so:

Gras had encouraged Florence to turn her thesis into a “commercial history of Lucca” incorporating the material on the silk industry, but she resisted his more ambitious conception of the project. And, though she regularly told Gras that a manuscript was ready or nearly ready throughout 1936, she never completed the book.Footnote ¹⁰² The Flemish glossary project, too, fell apart and was finally abandoned when G. W. Cottrell, Jr., wrote her to explain that the American Council of Learned Societies could not fund the project in 1937 because of the still dire financial situation for academic organizations in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰³

A Scholarly Partnership

Twenty-four days after her wedding, Florence wrote Gras to tell him of it, of how she and Raymond had spent their honeymoon “visiting archives and historians” and mentioned, though Gras likely knew already, that Raymond had received a letter of acceptance from Harvard Business School.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Raymond de Roover received his Harvard MBA in 1938, studying with Gras in the business school and with Abbott Payson Usher, across the Charles River in Harvard University’s Department of Economics. When Raymond’s first two books were published a decade later, he did not fail to stress—even at this temporal distance—the formative influence of Gras on his work. In the preface to Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges, which emerged out of his Chicago doctoral thesis, Raymond declared: “[My] emphasis on managerial problems, on business policy, and on administration is traceable to the teaching and the writings of N. S. B. Gras.” Over a lengthy period of time, Gras had ushered this book to publication with the Mediaeval Academy of America, ultimately acquiring a $1,000 subvention from the Business History Foundation for its printing and to purchase copies.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ More strikingly, Raymond dedicated his first study of The Medici Bank, “To N. S. B. Gras, whose teaching inspired this study on one of the most famous business firms in history.”

And, even before Raymond’s initial plans to come to America were settled, he had already envisioned this outcome, writing to Gras in 1935:

When Raymond applied to the CRB for a fellowship to help him study at Harvard Business School, he was even clearer about why it was the right place for him:

When Gras in 1943 wrote Raymond, then teaching at Wells College in central New York and half a decade out of the Business School, and addressed him as “Professor De Roover” in the letter’s salutation, the young professor replied:

There is a rhetoric of deference at work here, of course, but that is not all.

A veritable sea-change is apparent between De Roover’s early works and the first product of Gras’s business-historical tutelage: the essay “A Florentine Firm of Cloth Manufacturers,” was awarded Harvard University’s Bowdoin Prize in 1938 and published in Speculum, the Mediaeval Academy of America’s prestigious journal, in 1941.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The article was sent to Selfridge’s son, Harry Gordon Selfridge Jr., who wrote to Raymond a “very nice letter” quoted by him in a letter to Gras:

Gras had not always been impressed with the young De Roover’s scholarship. Soon after Florence had begun sending him offprints in 1935, Gras shared with Florence his frank estimation of the Belgian’s early works: “The articles that were sent to me showed promise but, except in one, not great mastery.”Footnote ¹¹² But Gras could not have been less than truly pleased by the reception of Raymond’s prize essay, which dealt, in an obviously Gras-inspired way, with managerial aspects of business, and which justified Gras’s vision for doing business history with medieval sources and the Business School’s efforts to bring Selfridge’s collection to Baker Library.

In an assessment of Raymond de Roover’s work, written shortly after his death in 1972, Richard Goldthwaite noted the particular importance of this article, which, he argued, “led to a major revision in our understanding of the organization of the cloth industry in Florence” by significantly amending Alfred Doren’s take on it. The German historian forty years earlier, and largely employing normative sources like wool guild (Arte della Lana) statutes, had seen the Florentine wool industry as a “highly organized, even quasi-capitalistic structure with centralized control by the wool merchants over industrial production and workers.” De Roover, using the business records of a single firm, instead showed the firm acting as a “relatively free agent” relative to the guild, workers, and other raw and finished cloth merchants, thus “de-emphasizing the guild and … revealing … considerable fluidity in human relations within the system and therefore the more amorphous quality of industrial society as a whole.”Footnote ¹¹³ While Gras’s influence on the method and argument of “A Florentine Firm of Cloth Manufacturers” is plainly apparent, the greatest influence cannot but be Florence’s early work with the same manuscripts. Indeed, Florence’s appendices on the woolen cloth trade and bookkeeping methods in the Medici manuscripts had laid the groundwork for Raymond’s investigation. Raymond understood the importance of these appendices very well and, in 1937, almost certainly before beginning work on the Speculum essay, he reminded readers of one of his early surveys of the origins of double entry bookkeeping that, in addition to the terminological portion of the Glossary, the appendices “should not be forgotten.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Before coming to the Business School, Raymond had told Gras that he wanted to work on the Medici documents there, “but that,” he noted, “would doubtless be in collaboration with Miss Edler,” and doubtlessly it was.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Florence’s time in Europe, supported by the CRB, stretching from the publication of the Glossary to her return to the United States with her new husband, was of incredible importance for her development as a scholar and for her future historical work. Not including reviews, Florence published thirty-three articles in the thirty-seven-year period between 1934 (the release of the Glossary) and 1971 (the date of the last publication of her lifetime; she published nothing from 1971 to her death, in Florence, Italy, in 1987). Some 45 percent of these articles were published in the first five years (1935 to 1940), and 58 percent in the first decade (1935 to 1945). Her research in Antwerp in 1934 to 1936 directly resulted in at least ten publications (over 30 percent of all her future work).Footnote ¹¹⁶ Perhaps the most important of this research was her use of the Van der Molen letters, reporting to Gras on November 19, 1934:

Florence wrote Power early the next year to describe the work she had already done with the letters, including making “a complete index of the 1150 odd letters,” which have been copied into the 600-page volume, and asking her—“because I know so very little about English history”—if the material contained in them would be good for an article. Her article “Winchcombe Kerseys in Antwerp, 1538–1544” was published in Antwerp in 1936. In 1938 she published a major sixty-seven-page study titled “The Van der Molen, Commission Merchants of Antwerp: Trade with Italy, 1538–44” in a festschrift for James Westfall Thompson.Footnote ¹¹⁸ “The letters are such a rich source of economic history for the period, 1538–44, that I believe I could write an indefinite number of articles based upon them for different types of journals,” she would later explain to Gras.Footnote ¹¹⁹ And, indeed, in addition to these two articles, she would publish five additional studies based on them. Sometime before 1945, Florence typed up a list of “Projected Publications” that included “The Market for Cloths of Harlem and Leyden in Italy, 1538–1544” and “The Market for Flemish Tapestries in Italy, 1538–1544,” though neither ever appeared, nor did “two or three other articles based on the Van der Molen letters for Italian periodicals.” Nor did a volume of transcribed Van der Molen letters in the collection of sources for Italian economic history, edited by Federico Patetta and Mario Chiaudano. Had they all appeared, the publications stemming from the Van der Molen letters would have been twelve or thirteen.Footnote ¹²⁰ Her research at the Plantin Museum in Antwerp in the same period resulted in at least two articles on the early history of printing. Florence’s association with Gras and with Harvard Business School also imprinted itself significantly on Florence’s published work. She translated Gino Luzzatto’s essay “The Study of Medieval Economic History in Italy: Recent Literature and Tendencies” for the now defunct Journal of Economic and Business History. She contributed material on medieval Italian business history to an article she co-authored with Gras, Henrietta Larson, and others. “The Literature of Business History” appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1937, and some seven of her post-Glossary articles were published in the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, which later became this journal.

It was the Glossary, though, which would overshadow all her other work. Florence herself wrote:

Henri Lapeyre, in the pages of Annales at the same time, could refer to another glossary as “of the type of Miss Florence Edler’s Italian glossary.”Footnote ¹²² Indeed, thanks to the relatively small networks of economic historians, and the publicity surrounding the preparations, Florence was known in Europe even before she published the Glossary. In 1933, André Émile Sayous, an historian with a background in business, and himself part of Gras’s larger network, quoted the published four-page abstract of Florence’s thesis, and noted that it “would be very useful to have the whole text.”Footnote ¹²³ When she met in Germany with Alfred Schirmer, the author of the Wörterbuch der deutschen Kaufmannssprache auf geschichtlichen Grundlagen (1911), in many ways a precursor of Florence’s glossary from historical sources, he told her he had studied her dictionary “very carefully” in preparation for his own lexicological work. She would later carry on a “three-cornered correspondence” with Schirmer and Gino Luzzatto about the expression banca rotta and its derived German word bankrott.Footnote ¹²⁴

Depression, War, and Displacement

Late in 1939, just one hundred days after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, Raymond de Roover received a surprise job offer to teach at the business school attached to the University of Louvain. Not long after, he wrote to Gras, asking him for advice and asking him to keep the message “strictly confidential” and not to write Florence about it. After laying out the benefits of taking the job, he stressed some of the drawbacks. They include:

1. a) Florence is very much against my accepting the offer and does not want to return to Belgium or to live there. If I accept, my marriage may go on the rocks.

2. b) In any case, Florence will have to stay here until the war is over and nobody knows how long it is going to last.

Having “carefully digested the pros and cons,” Gras advised that Raymond take the job:

It is impossible to know if, even at this late stage, Gras would still have advised Florence against marrying him. Or if Gras was playing the role of a practical adviser and evangelist for business history. Ultimately it was moot: Raymond turned down the position, chiefly because the salary was not as high as he had expected.Footnote ¹²⁶

As soon as he had finished his studies under Gras at Harvard Business School, Raymond enrolled in the PhD program in Economics at the University of Chicago, where his wife had taken all of her degrees, and he remained in steady correspondence with Gras throughout his doctoral work and early teaching career. There can be no doubt that Florence had already blazed a trail for Raymond at American institutions that would welcome him in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Raymond’s respective MBA and PhD advisers, Gras and John Ulric Nef (at the University of Chicago), had both read Florence Edler’s doctoral thesis before she left for Europe in 1934 and given her annotated copies to make revisions.Footnote ¹²⁷ Nor can there be doubt that Raymond’s American training and scholarly development in the same period resulted directly from Florence’s guidance and encouragement. No longer literally his teacher, Gras adopted the quasi-paternal role of well-connected patron with flair, to present just a few examples, by inviting Raymond to be a discussant at an American Historical Association meeting panel, recommending him for jobs at colleges and universities and the Library of Congress, and even directly helping with his US naturalization.Footnote ¹²⁸ Raymond was immediately impressed by University of Chicago and wasted no time in telling Gras that Harvard University was “lagging behind” Chicago “in our common field” and of how the “backwardness of Harvard” was a common topic of conversation. But scholarly differences emerged rapidly between Raymond and Nef, a friend of Robert Maynard Hutchins (who would be, during Raymond’s stay in Chicago, increasingly supportive of and instrumental in the transformation of Chicago’s curriculum and identity). Within months of arriving at Chicago, Raymond told Gras that Nef “does not see the business point of view,” adding “I am glad indeed that I took your course: it is unique in the world and will have a lasting influence on my further career.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Even as he reached the end of his PhD program, Raymond seemed anxious for Gras to know that, though Chicago had pushed him in other directions, he remained a business historian at heart.

Gras, a zealous protector of his discipline’s borders, would disagree and later advise Raymond that his series Harvard Studies in Business History would not be right for the book that emerged from the thesis, which belongs, he explained, “to that part of economic history generally dealt with as commercial and financial history. This is very close to business history and very important for it, but it is different.”Footnote ¹³¹ It was not only Raymond who noted that Gras’s movement, and the ideology of the Business School, was seriously at odds with what was happening at the University of Chicago. On March 3, 1940, an editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune—“Having completed their courses in halls largely provided by successful business men out of their profits, the seniors heard Dr. Hutchins in a convocation sermon denounce private enterprise for being materialistic and propose what he called a revolution”—in which the editorial’s author, to counter Hutchins’s exhortation to “read the classics recommended,” instead suggested that readers pick up Gras’s 1939 Business and Capitalism. About a month later Raymond sent the clipped article to Gras with this explanation:

Gras replied briefly and with cutting sarcasm, “I have been amazed at [Hutchins’s] denunciation of business men at a recent banquet in Boston just before he passed around his hat to receive donations from them.”Footnote ¹³²

A medievalist of some note before coming to Harvard, Gras had to balance the Business School’s overwhelming predisposition for American business history with his vision of a business history deeply marked by medieval precedents and practices. “It is very good,” he would tell Florence, “to have the medieval business history influence in our midst,” but this became harder and harder against the background of the mounting financial instability that the Great Depression brought to universities and learned societies.Footnote ¹³³

The specter of the Great Depression had, indeed, haunted Gras’s correspondence with Florence. It emerged, often obliquely, in relation to Gras’s doomed Journal of Economic and Business History. All throughout 1935, for example, Florence would continue to remind Gras of the journal’s esteem and the desire of Europeans for its return:

And Gras, ever hopeful, would reply with talk of vague plans “floating around” and of changes in the Business Historical Society “promis[ing] something in the direction of the resurrection of the Journal.”Footnote ¹³⁵ More pressing for Florence herself was that financial concerns meant that Gras was unable to acquire the funds necessary to continue work on the Medici and Barberini collections: “I see no chance of developing Italian or mediaeval studies at the School of Business for some time,” he would write to her. And that finding a well-paying research position in Cambridge was nearly impossible: “The comfortable days of good salary are over for a while. Unless you recognize this fact, you can get nowhere.” Gras must have been disappointed in the situation not only for Florence certainly but also for the survival of his vision for business history, a vision perhaps uniquely expansive in the world of Harvard Business School with its primary interest in American business. “I think,” he wrote Florence on another occasion, “that I am probably one of the few people here who really want to do something with our medieval business records. I believe that with return of real prosperity, we can make some arrangement that will be somewhat commensurate with the opportunities. Everything depends upon money, I am sorry to say.”Footnote ¹³⁶

Just as the Great Depression hung over the Gras–Edler correspondence in the mid-1930s, the Second World War was, not surprisingly, a constant point of reference in the Gras–De Roover correspondence of the early 1940s. As he was finishing his thesis and sending chapters to Gras, De Roover, who had served with distinction in the Belgian Army, applied for an American commission in hopes of avoiding the draft. “[B]ut the offices in Washington are so very slow,” he told his mentor, “that the draft may get me first, as it probably got Lopez. So those former officers in royal service may all be privates for Uncle Sam.”Footnote ¹³⁷ The economic historian Roberto S. Lopez, who had immigrated to the United States from Italy (by way of England) in 1939, was, in fact, working in the Italian Section of the Office of War Information in New York, editing scripts for Voice of America propaganda broadcasts.Footnote ¹³⁸ And Lopez and the De Roovers had, by this time, already begun a long friendship that similarly produced an extensive correspondence. Less than a month earlier, Raymond had written to Lopez, asking in French, the language of their epistolary exchanges: “What about you, will you join Uncle Sam? I am in more or less the same situation. I expect to be ‘drafted’ any moment. What has me worried is that my thesis is not entirely done.” To which Florence added a note: “Maybe we could meet in Chicago before you take up Barracks’ life, or even drive up to Madison, if Raymond is still at liberty.” Even if he could avoid it himself, the draft had larger implications for De Roover’s career because of its impact on college enrollments. “If the eighteen and nineteen year old youths will be called,” he wrote Gras, explaining that he would also look for work in the business field, “the chances of getting an academic job are rather slim.”Footnote ¹³⁹ And the war itself, wartime mobilization, and the changes they promised on the homefront seemed to presage a coming transformation for academia.

On July 17, 1942, Raymond wrote Gras asking, “Do you know that Robert Reynolds is in Washington working for Colonel Donovan as an expert on Italy, we suppose?” William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the so-called father of American intelligence, was the wartime head of the OSS, the precursor organization to the CIA. Reynolds, an economic historian with expertise in medieval Genoese notarial records, who had studied in Ghent, and had published his first two articles in a Belgian journal (his third appeared in Gras’s Journal of Economic and Business History), was a friend of the De Roovers and part of Gras’s extended network of friends and collaborators in the field of economic history. ^{Footnote 140} From the beginnings of the “medieval business terms” project, Reynolds and Hilmar Krueger, his collaborator at the University of Wisconsin, were set to produce for Gras, under the guidance of Eugene H. Byrne, who had left Wisconsin for Barnard College in 1931, a glossary of Latin business terms drawn largely from notarial documents, but it was never completed.Footnote ¹⁴¹ After finishing his thesis, Raymond visited Gras and his wife at their summer home in South Hero, Vermont, and, in writing to thank them for the visit, he added that he had applied with the US Civil Service Commission to be a “foreign country analyst” and hoped this would solve his draft problem. Reynolds was able to “arrange several important interviews” for Raymond in Washington; Gras and Nef sent in supporting materials on his behalf; and they all hoped the fact that Dr. Katherine Frederic, a recent Chicago PhD (1939, in Political Science), who was in the commission’s “examining unit,” could help him. When this seemed caught up in government bureaucracy, Gras personally wrote to the president of the University of Virginia to recommend Raymond immediately for the School of Military Government; two weeks after that, Gras recommended him for Harvard Professor Carl Joachim Friedrich’s School of Overseas Administration—both schools had been formed to train administrators and educators for what would become American occupied territories. If nothing came of these attempts, Raymond told Gras, he intended to enlist in officer training school. “Professor Reynolds thinks that, after the war, it will be extremely difficult for persons, who have not been in service or not been connected with essential war work, to find jobs,” he explained, adding “I believe he is right.”Footnote ¹⁴² But for Raymond, “the New Year [1943] brought a shower” of job offers. He quickly accepted a position as an assistant professor of Economics and Business, beginning January 25, at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, the city where his wife was also teaching. In the next academic year, he moved to Wells College, in Aurora, New York (where he had briefly taught while pursuing his doctoral studies) to take a position as an assistant professor of Economics. Part of the reason he gave to Gras for the move was that Wells, a women’s college, would not be affected like Illinois by the war. “Enrollment was falling fast” at Illinois College, and, during the semester, Raymond had “lost most of [his] boy-students” when the reserves were called up. “I heard that [Illinois College’s president] is looking around for a low-priced instructor who could teach … some elementary economics” because all the advanced students were gone, and the “President does not need a Ph.D. to teach elementary courses.”Footnote ¹⁴³

It is altogether possible that Reynolds thought Raymond could also do work in wartime intelligence as a “country analyst” in the civil service, or perhaps even as a civilian in the secret services. Harvard’s History department was a major source of talent for the OSS and the department lent professors, fellows, and recent PhDs to the effort (including Crane Brinton, John Clive, John K. Fairbank, Franklin L. Ford, H. Stuart Hughes, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Robert Lee Wolff). Nor was Reynolds the only economic historian of Renaissance Italy who was a member of the OSS. By the time Raymond visited Reynolds in Washington, Allan Evans was in London working at the OSS’s Research and Analysis branch under his Harvard history colleague Crane Brinton. In relation to rumors he had heard in 1940 about the Flemish historian Emile Coornaert doing espionage work for the French, Raymond asked Gras rhetorically, “Is it not a nice world where university professors are doing the job of spies?” We can only wonder how Raymond felt about all of this, and, though he was surely proud of his military service in Belgium, of his own practical desires to find work in the war effort.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Although many of the scholar-spies of the war returned to academic life, Evans did not, moving instead to the State Department’s Bureau of Research, where he achieved prominence in the coming decades.

Just because Raymond de Roover escaped the draft and found an academic job, it did not mean that the war’s profound effect on the De Roovers was over. The postwar devastation in Europe, where Raymond and Florence both had friends and relatives in need of assistance, meant that their already tight finances would be further stretched. The situation in Italy could be especially dire for scholars: “Sapori … tells of how hard it is for intellectuals to get enough to eat,” Florence wrote to Allan Evans more than fourteen months after V-E Day. “[Eugenio] Lazzareschi [an archivist in Lucca] says the same. His house was destroyed by German shell fire; as the Germans withdrew from Lucca, they bombed or shelled the city a short time…. As Lazzareschi has four or five children, it must have been pretty hard on the family to lose their home.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The situation in Europe would dwell in Raymond’s anguished thoughts for years. Early in 1951, he wrote his fellow immigrant Lopez: “[F]or those who have family in Europe, it is agonizing. We must admit that the Americans were immeasurably improvident. This ‘unconditional surrender’ was the greatest folly ever invented.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ But the De Roovers did what they could to help, at a cost to themselves and to Florence’s work. “We are badly pressed for funds,” Florence told Lopez, and to Allan Evans she explained:

Seven months later, Florence took a position as visiting professor and acting head of the Department of History at Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania; her “Medici book” was never completed.

Disappointment and Discovery

When Gras wrote of Florence, still wrapped in the aura of the success of the Glossary, that she had “a habit of finishing” what she starts, his confidence would have appeared wholly justified. But the rest of her career was marked, to the contrary, and perhaps to our great loss, by a habit of not finishing things. Florence left at least four significant book projects unfinished. On a list of her publications that she typed or revised in 1950, Florence added, at the bottom, a single “forthcoming” work: Lucca: Medieval City of Silks: A Study in Medieval Capitalism, Technology and Art. In parentheses the date 1946 was given, with 1951 added as a correction underneath. This book, the projected outgrowth of her 1930 dissertation, seems to have hung like an albatross around her neck for decades. It was, she was constantly saying, almost done. Soon after Florence’s death in 1987, her brother Alfred, an attorney who had been helping his sister financially and practically in the last years of her life, provided an affidavit to establish Illinois as the place for probate of her will, noting that she “moved to Florence, Italy for the expressed purpose of completing a book dealing with the Florentine silk industry—a book which she had started before her marriage—a book which required research in the Florence museums and archives in the surrounding towns.” This is almost certainly the never completed Lucca book, although slightly misdescribed.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ On a typed list of her “Projected Publications,” probably composed around 1946, the Lucca book, then called The Silk Trade of Lucca: A Study in Medieval Capitalism, was already described in parentheses as “completed.” Another book, Medieval Business and Business Men, 1150–1550, was described as “in preparation”; and a third, the ambitious Francesco Datini: Business Genius of Long Ago (“based on material photographed in the Datini archives in Prato in 1938, material used in Raymond De Roover’s Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges”) was listed with no indication of progress. Several years later, Raymond would propose the same project for a Guggenheim Fellowship that he won, just as Florence failed to receive a Guggenheim to write a biography of Francesco de’ Medici, the most prominent merchant in the Selfridge Collection. It was this book that she had told Evans she would finish before going back to work. In 1948, she announced publicly that it was being readied for publication in the first issue of Renaissance News, under the title A Biography of Francesco di Giuliano de’ Medici (1450–1528), Business Man of Florence.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

After Florence married Raymond, her correspondence with Gras rapidly dwindled and nearly dried up, and it was supplanted by a correspondence (of hundreds of pages, sent back and forth between 1937 and 1950, six years before Gras’s death) between Gras and De Roover.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Needless to say, the gendered formalities of the time likely militated against Gras, a man and a married one, carrying on an extensive correspondence with another man’s wife. More to the point, similar formalities within academia enshrouded unmarried female scholars in a very different aura than married ones, expected to no longer pursue their own careers but to serve their husband’s. The line between the world of scholarship and the marital or domestic sphere was permeable but distinctly drawn. But there is a sense, all too apparent, in which Raymond simply replaced Florence as Gras’s protégé.

In his correspondence with Gras, though, Raymond also conscientiously and regularly shared news of “Signora Fiorenza” (as he often called his wife in these letters) and of their scholarly partnership.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Two specific incidents are revealing for understanding the nature of the occasionally tripartite, if not triadic, relationship among Gras and the De Roovers. The first incident was at the eighth annual meeting of the Economic History Association, held in Cambridge in September 1948. Ralph E. Turner, of Yale University, who had lost his position at the University of Pittsburgh because of his political activism and suspected communist sympathies in 1934, presented a paper titled “Economic Discontent in Medieval Western Europe,” and Florence was asked to comment.Footnote ¹⁵² As Raymond described the events to Gras, her comments caused quite a “stir”:

Raymond also attached a carbon copy of Florence’s comments and corrections for Turner, running to thirteen typed pages, for a paper that, when printed, ran to only sixteen. Gras, perhaps as much an admirer of Florence’s talents as her husband, replied, “I have enjoyed [the comments] immensely. Something like this job has to be done on occasion. I think in Europe they do it with more zest than we do in America.”Footnote ¹⁵³ After stating that the majority of economic historians question Marxian theories of class conflict, even “such prominent socialists as … the present Italian Senator, Armando Sapori,” Florence, in her comments, pulls no punches in exposing Turner’s paper as based on politicized and often incorrect facts. “I do not like the anachronism of comparing the Medici regime of Florence with Fascism,” she wrote, to cite one example. “Lorenzo was at best (or worst?) a political boss.” To Turner’s claim that great merchants had “no need for the guilds,” she replied: “As a matter of fact, the Medici were members of three guilds … I have a copy of the records showing the date of matriculation of the various members of all branches of the Medici family in all the Florentine guilds from the fourteenth to the 16th centuries.” In the published version, Turner removed his claim about the guilds but kept “fascism” where it was. Although she objected at the conference that “I hold no brief for the ruling classes,” there is little doubt that the vehemence of many of her objections and “applause” of the crowd were politically motivated.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Raymond’s disdain for communists is apparent in his letters to Gras:

And though Raymond “admire[s] him” still for his work, his words about Sapori are depressing: “He is an ‘Independent’ but votes with the Left…. Perhaps he has sold his soul for thirty silver pieces. At any rate, he goes to Paris in a sleeping car (and that for a defender of the proletariat).”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The second incident, surely the best known in the De Roovers’ partnership, occurred in winter 1949. Raymond, who had less than two years earlier published his first monographic study of the Medici bank and dedicated it to Gras, wrote to his Business School professor on May 3, 1950, with the news: “While I was in Belgium to visit my mother, the Signora Fiorenza discovered some two thousand odd documents on the Medici, including three secret ledgers covering a period of more than fifty years or, to be precise, from 1397 to 1450.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ These documents would allow Raymond de Roover to complete his second and greatly expanded book on the subject, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, published in 1963, for which he remains justly famous, and which was praised at the time by Lopez as “a work of capital importance,” and by the expert on usury and later federal judge John T. Noonan as “the best book ever written on the medieval banking system,” almost certainly an assessment that remains true over fifty years later.

In his preface of that book, Raymond, declaring that Florence’s name should appear on the cover, recounted the same story as he had over a decade earlier: Florence wrote him in Belgium during the Christmas season of 1949. “The letter,” he writes, “contained a summons to rush back to Italy and to abandon all other projects…. From then on, my wife took charge of all the research involved in this new scheme.” In her editor’s introduction, Henrietta Larson, the first female professor of Business at Harvard Business School, and a long-time ally of Gras, reminded readers that Florence had gotten her start at the Business School, as well as with the Selfridge manuscripts:

That Florence “disclaime[d] participation” and “steadfastly declined” her husband’s offer to give her a co-author credit, or at least that she came to do so over the course of the book’s long gestation as her independent career drifted further into the dark backward of time, is not in doubt. What Raymond, who typed the tables, but not the text, says in the acknowledgments, where he in an amusing and idiosyncratic way provides #ThanksForTyping, is worth quoting at length:

Nor can it be doubted that Raymond had and would continue to contribute to his wife’s work in significant ways without himself taking an author credit; indeed, in 1943 Florence had made an explicit note of such a case, thanking her husband “who refuses to have his name appear in the by-line where I think it belongs.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Closer to the events of Christmas 1949, though, Florence at least once suggested that the fruits of the discovery (described equanimously as theirs and not hers alone, as Raymond had and would) might result in shared publications. Early in 1951, she wrote Marian Hague, a noted lace collector and expert in New York:

These plans changed over time, and Raymond was never inconspicuous about crediting his wife, but Edler and Gras knew well that even when a woman was given a co-author credit, her contributions could be overlooked. In 1930, Gras and his wife, Ethel Culbert Gras, herself an economic historian, had published together a socio-economic history of the small village of Crawley, in Hampshire, England. But the review of it that appeared in the Economic History Review, written by Elizabeth Levett, proceeded to discuss it, in an incomprehensible act of petty damnatio memoriae, as if only N. S. B. Gras had written it: “Professor Gras,” it begins, “ought to be warmly congratulated…. He has written a history of an ordinary small English village, in a volume of 700 pages, and his documentary evidence extends from A.D. 909 to 1928.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ Levett’s review was evidently a source of both amusement and consternation for N. S. B. and Ethel Gras, as is made clear in an anecdote that Florence shared with Gras in a 1935 letter. Through Raymond, she had met the young Belgian scholar Jan Arthur van Houtte:

The famous discovery of the libri segreti of the Medici bank occurred while the De Roovers were in Europe together, thanks to Raymond’s 1949 Guggenheim Fellowship, which he was awarded to work on Francesco di Marco Datini, the famous merchant of Prato, the collection of whose medieval business letters is by far the largest extant. Only one year prior, Florence had still been hoping that Gras could convince the board of trustees of the Business History Foundation to support her work on the Medici manuscripts at Baker; and Gras assured her, “I am not going to forget” about it because he still thought it “decidedly worthwhile.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Raymond had been “invited” to apply (he himself used the quotation marks in a postcard to Gras) for his award; and the head of the Guggenheim Foundation, Henry Allen Moe, naturally solicited a recommendation from Gras.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Moe had also solicited a recommendation for Florence in November 1943, but her Guggenheim application, proposing a biography of Francesco di Giuliano de’ Medici, as noted earlier was not successful.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In May 1944, Raymond told Gras of how deeply this failure had affected her. “She has been very much disappointed in her failure to secure a Guggenheim,” he wrote:

Gras could only offer as consolation agreement that her failure to win the Guggenheim was based on “shifting conditions in the world of scholarship.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Florence’s disappointment came at what was to be a turning point in her scholarly life. In retrospect, indeed, it is difficult to overestimate its importance in bringing an end to her academic career separate from Raymond’s, or at least signaling its end. Florence had already considered applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and even requested an application, but she backed out after that year’s winners were announced, telling Moe: “My subject is somewhat similar to that of Hans Baron, at least it is in the field of Florentine history, and I feel that it would have a better chance of being favorably considered at a later date.” Baron had won a fellowship for his project, “Humanism and the City State,” which presumably resulted in part in his monumental Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance a decade later.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ When she applied the next year, she provided a personal statement with a numbered list of her qualifications. “Perhaps my attainments in my proposed field of study can best be summed up as follows”:

1. (1) Comprehensive knowledge of Italian economic history in the medieval and early modern periods with considerable information about the economic history of countries related to Italy through trade. Others would probably state that I have made useful, perhaps outstanding, contributions to this general field through my published works.

2. (2) Acquaintance with a considerable amount of new information on medieval banking acquired in the past two years while my husband was writing a volume on the subject.

3. (3) Specific technical knowledge of the Florentine woolen industry and sufficient knowledge of the woolen industry in the Low Countries and England to make comparisons.

4. (4) Detailed knowledge of the business organization of Florentine industrial and commercial firms.

5. (5) Familiarity with the handwriting, the accounting methods, the monetary system, the weights and measures of the Medici MSS, in short, an intimate knowledge of the Selfridge Collection, such as no one else possesses.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

One never finds a hint of false modesty in Florence’s self-estimation, but here “useful, perhaps outstanding” seem almost meek. Especially considering that, in the same statement, she described the Selfridge manuscripts, perhaps hyperbolically, as “the next most important single collection of Italian business records in existence” after the Datini archives in Prato.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Gras recommended Florence’s proposal enthusiastically but laconically, which was characteristic of him: “Mrs. De Roover’s project is of a high order, the subject being important, the manuscripts available, and the scholar well trained for the job. Rarely is a promise of good results so clear cut.” So too did A. P. Usher:

Although her first mentor had been dead for just over two years when she applied, his opinion—as if from beyond the grave—was voiced by Lynn Townsend White Jr., then president of Mills College, in Oakland, California. Wrote White:

John Nef echoed Thompson’s sentiment that Florence’s position did not suit her: “She is a much better scholar than her academic position … would indicate. On the basis of her published work, she ranks high among the women historians under fifty in this country.” Frederic Lane also gave a long and glowing report: “Except possibly for Mr. De Roover and perhaps Armando Sapori, if he is still alive, she is better qualified than any other person in the world to use these materials.” The “possibly” in that sentence is crucial, and pregnant with the unspoken—and a number of her other reviewers took the opportunity of her proposal to pass judgment on Raymond.

“Of the matrimonial team she is the driving force,” wrote Herbert Heaton, an acolyte of Gras, who would go on to write a biography of Edwin Gay. Earl J. Hamilton, then at Duke University, provided the most startling assessment:

Hamilton’s words seem to have worried the Guggenheim Foundation enough that Frank Aydelotte, on its advisory board, asked McClelland, the president of MacMurray College, for information about Raymond.

In response, Florence wrote Moe directly, and submitted two and a half pages of “addenda” concerning Raymond, pages worth quoting at some length:Footnote ¹⁷¹

And in fall 1942, she recounts:

Nothing came of this:

This account, a far more personal statement than the original “personal statement,” clearly provoked by concerns about her work being subordinated to her husband’s, is a rich text for understanding the De Roovers’ personal relationship to what Gras called “the shifting conditions” of academia in the emerging postwar world and Florence’s personal anxieties about what that world would mean for a woman and for a woman married to a man who, try though he did, had not served his adopted country.

Less than a month later, Moe wrote to Florence to request an additional budget of probable expenses, adding:

Given this very positive letter, in which Moe “practically says that she will be awarded a Guggenheim,” and the fact that her file contained no indication of serious dissent, former vice president and secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, André Bernard, described Florence’s failure to win a Guggenheim as “a mystery.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴

The 1944 announcement included thirteen women, until then the largest number ever to receive Guggenheim Fellowships in a single year. Sixty-nine awards were given from over 900 applications. From its beginnings, the Guggenheim Foundation offered fellowships to women and to racial, sexual, and political minorities, so there can be no inference that her rejection was a product of sexism. It seems, rather, that doubts about Raymond may have hurt Florence’s application. We should take Hamilton’s comparative assessment of Florence’s and Raymond’s respective “ability” with a grain of salt, because it is clear that Hamilton personally disliked Raymond. However, the question of whether he would be an asset to her remains an open one, even today. Not aware of Hamilton’s critique, it seems clear that Florence assumed concerns about her husband were about his career and his wartime service.

Whether or not the war had anything to do with the selection of Guggenheim awards, Raymond’s own disappointment may have been even more directly related to it. In a remarkable letter dated April 16, 1944, written in the immediate aftermath of her failure to win the Guggenheim, Florence told Moe:

Although Moe encouraged her, Florence never re-applied for the Guggenheim.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Nor did she join the WACS, even though there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of her desire to do so. Although it might strike us today as grandiose, the notion, attributed to both Raymond and to Earl Hamilton, that Florence had a special responsibility to work with the Selfridge Collection—indeed, a moral obligation to do so—is one that Florence had earlier adopted.

Only two months earlier, Florence had resigned from her position at MacMurray College. In accepting her resignation, the college president wrote her to say:

Whether Florence would have resigned had she not believed she would receive the Guggenheim Fellowship, we cannot say. She, though in retrospect, in early 1946, told Robert Reynolds that she had “resigned from MacMurray because I am tired of the corn fields, etc.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Her letter of resignation, though, had employed the same rhetoric that she later used in her letter to Moe, to Earl Hamilton, and to Raymond:

Among the many demands upon her as a scholar of international reputation, the ones that go unmentioned here, unsurprisingly, are those that Hamilton had highlighted; namely, the demands of her husband Raymond on her time and labor.

Domestic Life and Thwarted Ambitions

Florence Edler de Roover’s communications with other women provide a glimpse, albeit fleeting, of how she adapted to life as a wife in the increasingly idealized and consumerist household sphere of 1950s America. There is a strange dissonance when we read Florence’s words to Claude, Robert Lopez’s wife, in 1956, inserted between an offer to send Robert an extra copy of Giulia Camerani-Marri’s edition of the statutes of the Florentine Arte del Cambio and news that a set of proofs had just arrived for one of Raymond’s articles:

When Florence returned to the United States from Italy, where she and Raymond had been staying in the Villa Fabbricotti, north of Florence, along with other scholars and intellectuals, she saw it as a return to a kind of domestic enslavement. She wrote to Henrietta Larson:

Much of Florence’s work, manuscript and not, was, perhaps not surprisingly, work to help her husband. “I serve as Raymond’s secretary,” she told Lopez in 1946, “but I certainly need one of my own.” Raymond’s projects, at least sometimes, had to take precedence over hers. After beginning work on a translation for Gino Luzzatto and Lopez, Florence ultimately backed out, telling Lopez:

But Florence was also full of self-doubt. “I do not have a real talent for translation,” she had told Lopez months earlier, when trying to decide if she should accept the commission. When, more than a decade later, Lopez asked Florence to collaborate on an essay, she told him “I would either try to make too many changes or contribute virtually nothing. In any case, I would be unreliable,” and “My library job has me down much more than teaching hours would.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ But she did not like teaching either, as she had told Gras many times. In 1936, she wrote him on the subject at some length;

Florence spent her whole teaching career at women’s colleges. She did not enjoy teaching at Agnes Scott College; she left MacMurray College, where she had tenure and was head of her department, to work on her writing; and she returned to teaching, at Cedar Crest, only out of financial need. It would be easy to attribute the decline in her career entirely to the supporting role she had to play in her scholarly partnership with her husband, or to the declining fortunes of women in postwar academia, but, to some extent, her interest in doing research was difficult to sustain outside of a major university environment, and even that work seemed to lose its magic for her as the anni mirabiles of the mid-1930s receded into the past, accompanied by her growing self-doubt and perfectionism.

Soon after her return from Belgium, though, Florence was already interested in writing for a popular audience as well as a scholarly one. Having just returned to Cambridge, she wrote to the editors at Hillman-Curl Inc., publishers of the Leisure Hour Library to gauge their interest in a book she had “outlined and partially written,” a “popular but accurate history of the silk trade and silk industry in Western Europe from Ancient to Modern Times” that might be entitled The Story of Silk in European Life or The Romance of Silk in Western Europe (on the model, we assume, not of Selfridge but of Karl Sundheim’s 1937 The Romance of Exploration, published in the Leisure Hour series). Unlike the book that would come from her thesis, “a very scholarly book with more footnotes than text,” the Romance of Silk would be “fascinating,” “interesting,” and “filled with anecdotes.”Footnote ¹⁸³ She ended the letter with: “I also write short stories as a relief from the accuracy required in historical work, but most of those are published under pseudonyms.” Edler de Roover certainly had a flair for language, as when she described “hyacinth and tulip beds” to Gras as “a gorgeous riot of color”; and an interest in non-scholarly writing, as when she described the carnival in the Belgian town of Binche for Gras and “the whole department.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Her interests extended beyond archival economic history. In her 1951 letter to Marian Hague, of the Needle and Bobbin Club in New York, she explained that, though her thesis was “strictly a study in economic history, years later I became interested in the artistic side of the subject. I learned handweaving, studied fragments of Lucchese silks that are in American museums under microscopes, and tried to imitate some of the medieval Lucchese patterns.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The clearest lasting expression of Florence’s growing interest in the material and artistic sides of the subject is her important 1950 article “Lucchese Silks,” which appeared in the Ciba Review, published by the Swiss chemical company of the same name (Chemische Industrie Basel, or Ciba), and which Richard Goldthwaite has called “a milestone in the historiography of studies of the medieval Italian silk industry.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ But Florence’s multifaceted approach also informed a series of lectures that she gave, first in a traveling series in 1946, under the title “Lucca: Medieval City of Silks.” In 1951, she wrote to Robert Lopez to ask if he could arrange for her to give the lecture somewhere in New Haven, Connecticut, adding, “P.S. I have been receiving $50 for my lecture but can give it for any price, tho I should prefer not to give it for less than $25,” and attaching a description of the lecture. She and Raymond, she mentioned in the letter, were still paying off a bank loan that they had to take because the Guggenheim award was not substantial enough for the two of them to live in Italy. It is likely that Florence gave the lectures to supplement their income during the immediate postwar years and to fund her travels to various museums.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Raymond’s Decline and Florence’s Widowhood

It is clear that Raymond, in his later years, could be demanding and excitable. When Lopez was asked by Harvard University Press to submit a reader’s report on The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, which was published by the press in 1963, Raymond asked Lopez for a copy. Lopez refused, assuring De Roover that he had written that it was “destined to remain for a very long time THE book on the subject.” He added:

Raymond did not get the jobs in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, and was clearly upset about his inability to achieve a position at a more prestigious or, perhaps, more research-oriented university. In at least one case, Raymond attributed his failure to personal enmities, writing to Lopez: The Wisconsin position “fell through, because Earl Hamilton (who dislikes me) used pressure methods to push a student of his. Reynolds is not responsible, since Hamilton used the weight of his authority with the economists.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Raymond’s desire to move up in the academic pecking order was exacerbated by what he saw, increasingly, as the sorry state of American higher education. In May 1951, Raymond wrote to Lopez to share his frustrations about teaching at Wells College. Wells is “always upside-down,” and “I do not want to stay at a college that doesn’t have the slightest appreciation for scholarship,” adding that he hoped he could come to Yale “to examine the possibilities,” even of joining the History Department there. When Lopez wrote back to say that Raymond should have expressed interest sooner, and that there was now “no chance” of a position for him there, Florence replied: “Do not take Raymond’s query about a possible job in the history department very seriously. He is getting to the point where he thought economists would never offer him a job.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Raymond’s frustrations only increased at Boston College; he told Lopez on a 1957 postcard that the students are “cheaters” and “morons,” concluding, “If I find something else I will not stay at B.C. for any price.” Soon after, Raymond visited the Lopezes, and they found him “run down, extremely tense—in a word, close to a nervous breakdown” and seized by an “excessive preoccupation with the disciplinary problems in his classes,” to which “he made frequent references” over the course of the visit. Florence agreed with Lopez’s suggestion, made in a private letter (including “you should not say a word to Raymond that we have written you”): Raymond should leave Boston College “as soon as possible, since he has taken such a dislike to the undergraduates,” although they found him “quite cheerful and rather relaxed” after he finished grading exams. “I keep wondering,” Florence wrote, “whether there would be any chance of his getting an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ At Brooklyn College, his final position, the historian’s rage reached a (depressingly politicized and racially tinged) fever pitch. When Lopez asked Raymond if he could acquire an honorarium at Brooklyn College for his brother Guido, a writer and intellectual, visiting from Milan, De Roover replied:

Describing the “simply awful” situation at Brooklyn College to his nephew Robert Edler, a young attorney, Raymond wrote:

In the years before his death, Raymond told Ernest Stevelinck, a Belgian accountant and friend, that he did not plan to retire in the United States but hoped to find a place in the south of France. Taking on a somewhat ominously paranoid tone, he wrote:

Raymond de Roover, aged sixty-seven, died on March 14, 1972, at his and Florence’s home in Brooklyn. Following a pair of long and exasperating faculty meetings on March 13, Raymond had stayed up until 1:30 a.m. working on charts for an upcoming address he was scheduled to deliver in Prato at the conference of the Istituto Datini. Florence provided the details in a striking and, ultimately, pathos-laden letter to Frederic Lane a few weeks later:

One cannot but read into Florence’s “life with Raymond was never dull” more than a hint of exasperation and exhaustion, though we know very little of the De Roovers’ marriage and domestic life, and even less of her widowhood in Italy, which lasted more than a decade. “Whether I shall live long enough to finish the three or four books I have begun, or even one of them,” she stated bluntly, “is a big question.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Florence lived for fifteen more years, dying in Florence on September 6, 1987, but she never completed a book and published nothing after Raymond’s death. Florence’s remains were deposited in a niche under the portico at the Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori in Florence. The plaque reads simply:

Florence Edler de Roover

1900–1987

Historian Professor

R. I. P.