Located just ten miles from Florence and completely integrated into that city's economy, the small fourteenth-century Italian town of Prato lived mostly in the shadow of its larger neighbor. Its merchants and small businessmen and women would be forgotten today but for the survival of an unusual number of documents from Prato - detailed account books that preserve line-by-line records of business transactions. In no other Italian town - not even Florence - did account books survive in such quantity. Mining this unique resource, Richard K. Marshall throws new light on the everyday business life of Renaissance Italy.