Oikonomia urbana. Uno spaccato di Lodi in età moderna (secoli XVII-XVIII)

[Autom. eng. transl.] This book addresses the history of an urban community in which families and local institutions are imbricated in a complex network of social, ritual, financial and community relations. A journey through the twists and turns of a contradictory society, in which conflict is reflected in community solidarity, spiritual values in economic ones; whose baroque trait is however revealed in the ubiquitous propensity for agreement, the composition of opposites. The same Aristotelian fracture between the domestic and the public, or between the unity of the oikos and the multiplicity of the polis, seems to dissolve into a tropology of kinship that leads institutions and finally the community to the metaphor of the family. It follows a city oikonomia, whose components orientate their own economic strategies and behaviors more towards the laborious search for an unstable equilibrium, which makes up the interests of different subjects enclosed by the community membrane, than towards maximization. This articulated view of economic interest, which includes the care of community relations and charitable reciprocity, embraces the same exchanges, as well as the dynamics of credit, city taxation and state taxation.