Introduction to “Marriage and Elite Structure in Renaissance Florence, 1282-1500”

The following conference paper, written in 1994, is the first draft of an article eventually published in 2010 in Renaissance Quarterly, entitled “Open Elite? Social Mobility, Marriage, and Family in Florence, 1282-1494.” This introduction discusses the methodological justifications for publishing a first draft, written sixteen years before the final, more sophisticated article. By unveiling some steps of the actual process of research, it allows a discussion of the relationships between the two styles of “interpretation” in history and “testing hypotheses” in social science.