This book gathers together Goldthwaite's studies of various aspects of the world of the entrepreneur in 15th-century Florence. The subjects of these papers range from the formal education of businessmen in schools of commercial arithmetic to their operations as international bankers, and from the private householder that shaped some of their economic interests (including building a home) to the public urban scene in which they conducted business with one another. A general concern with the way social structures impinge on economic enterprise ties many of these studies together into a methodological as well as a thematic unity.