The AI Journal

Between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth, the city governments of Florence, Siena, Bologna and some forty other Italian communes passed laws restricting who could wear silk, ermine, pearls and cloth of gold, and then passed the same laws again a few years later, with the same complaint attached: that the previous statute had gone unheeded. Catherine Kovesi Killerby’s survey of the Italian material counts more than three hundred such enactments across those forty-odd cities, and devotes a chapter to what she calls, in its own title, the problem of enforcement and the failure of sumptuary law. The standard reading of this pattern is the one her title states outright: these were prohibitions, the prohibitions did not hold, and the evidence is the statute’s own repetition, each new version a government admitting the last one failed. I want to resist that reading, not by disputing the pattern but by disputing what it is evidence of. A law re-issued every few years while the people it names keep paying to ignore it is not obviously a law failing. It is, just as plausibly, a law succeeding at something other than the thing its preamble claims to want.

The case for reading these statutes as failed prohibition rests on taking their stated purpose at face value: a given law says no woman below the rank of knight’s wife may wear pearls, a woman below that rank is recorded wearing pearls and paying a fine, and the law is judged to have failed to stop her. Diane Owen Hughes’s 1983 essay on sumptuary law and social relations was among the first to notice that this judgement sits oddly with the behaviour of the governments doing the judging. If a law demonstrably does not work, the ordinary response of a government that wants it to work is to tighten it, not to copy it out again with the fine schedule updated. Hughes’s point was that the repetition itself needs explaining, and that a government indifferent to whether the pearls stopped appearing, so long as the fine kept arriving, would produce exactly this record: the same transgression, the same payment, the same statute, cycling for three hundred years because nothing about the cycle was broken. Alan Hunt’s later survey of European sumptuary law generalises the same suspicion: these statutes, he argues, were never a single-purpose instrument aimed at luxury as such, but a recurring mechanism combining social, economic and moral regulation, one that could fail at the first of those three jobs while doing the second rather well.

The clearest documented case of the second job being done well comes from Siena under Pandolfo Petrucci’s regime at the turn of the sixteenth century. Philippa Jackson’s study of patrician women and sumptuary law in that period finds a dress code enforced on the city’s elite with one explicit exception: the women of Petrucci’s own household were formally excused from it, by name, while the legislation they were excused from continued to be enforced, and to raise revenue, against everyone beneath them. A government sincerely committed to suppressing immodest display does not carve out its own ruling family as the one household permitted to display it; a government using the display of the many as a licensed, fee-bearing privilege has every reason to keep that privilege for itself. The same institutional logic shows up in the fine structure itself. Florence’s own administrative record is not punishment escalating against a stubborn public, but punishment softening into a product: individual fines for forbidden ornaments recur across the fourteenth century as a standing gabella, a commodity tax on the specific item, which by the 1370s let a household register and pay for the right to wear what the statute nominally forbade without separately justifying each garment at each wearing. Nobody converts a deterrent into a subscription. Florence converted this one.

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli’s comparative study of sumptuary law across Italy, France, Germany, Spain and England found the same statutes operating on several levels simultaneously, always invoking an aesthetic or moral rationale while doing other work beside it, and her later essay on the Italian material names that other work directly: sumptuary law as financial resource and instrument of rule, not primarily as restraint on dress. The aesthetic rationale was not window-dressing added to disguise a tax; it was the cover the tax needed to be politically sayable at all. A council that announced it was pricing the right to wear ermine would have been pricing a privilege it had just admitted belonged, by rank, to everyone below the knightly class as much as above it, which no commune wanted to concede. Framed instead as the defence of modesty against luxury’s creep, the same charge could be levied, re-levied, and adjusted by rank without ever conceding that rank itself, not virtue, decided who paid how much for what.

Read together, Hughes’s puzzle about the repetition, Hunt’s multi-purpose statute, Jackson’s exempted elite, and Muzzarelli’s financial framing converge on one description of what these laws were actually for. They priced status display rather than prohibiting it, using the language of prohibition because a tax on wearing pearls is harder to justify publicly than a ban on wearing them, and because the same fine schedule that reads, to a modern eye, as evidence of failure reads, to a treasury clerk totting up the commune’s income, as a reliable and renewable line of revenue, one a government has every reason to keep legislating back into existence.

The strongest objection to this argument is that it is too convenient to be falsifiable. If widespread compliance with a sumptuary law counts as the prohibition succeeding, and widespread violation counts as the revenue mechanism succeeding, then no observable pattern of behaviour could ever tell against the financial reading, and an account immune to disconfirmation by construction is not a historical finding but a redescription dressed as one. The objection has force against a version of the claim that stops there, and the claim has to be narrowed to survive it. The revenue account does not merely accommodate violation; it predicts a specific institutional signature that a sincere-prohibition account does not predict and that a pure indifference-to-outcome account does not predict either: formal fee schedules published alongside the prohibitory text, treasury records carrying sumptuary fines as a named category of income rather than an incidental one, the conversion of per-incident fines into a standing annual charge, and exemptions granted by rank to the households enforcing the law rather than merely tolerated by neglect. A government that simply could not enforce its own dress code would show patchy fines, no consolidated fee, and no principled reason why the ruler’s own family should be the one household excused. What the Sienese and Florentine records show instead is the consolidated fee and the named exemption together, which is not the signature of a law nobody could make stick. It is the signature of a law built, at the point a city stopped pretending it could stop the pearls and started pricing them, to be paid.