An essay titled “Of Cocks and Commerce: Sex, Money, and Value in Carletti,” by Associate Professor of History Mackenzie Cooley, was recently reviewed in the Corriere Fiorentino, the Florence cultural supplement to Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading national newspaper.
Cooley’s essay is included in the edited volume Trading at the Edge of the Empires: Francesco Carletti’s World (Harvard University Press / I Tatti). She notes that although the review discusses this volume as a whole, it centers on her chapter “as the interpretive core of the book, highlighting its argument about the relationship between sexuality, commerce, and global exchange in the early modern world.”
According to Cooley, the book itself emerges from the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) in Florence, and that Francesco Carletti was a Florentine merchant traveler. She said the review treats her chapter as the lens through which readers should understand Carletti’s travel narrative — especially the connection between sexual ethnography, global trade, and emerging capitalist forms of value in the 16th-century world. “It’s unusual for a specialized historical argument to be discussed in a major newspaper in this way,” she noted.
Cooley said that “having the work reviewed in Florence’s major cultural newspaper brings the scholarship back to the city whose archives and intellectual history it studies,” adding that she thinks “this is the case of [her] writing crossing over to a larger public, despite being scholarly.”
“In short,” she said, “it’s a nice example of Hamilton scholarship appearing in a major international media outlet, and in a context directly tied to the Renaissance world the research examines.”
Posted March 18, 2026
