Biography
Biography
My specializations are Renaissance and medieval economic. My Research and Teaching Interests: Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe; Renaissance Italy; History of Technology to 1600. Current Research: The Woolen Industry of Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Education
Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College
M.A., Bryn Mawr College
B.A., Hunter College
Books
An Expanding World: Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand
Maureen Mazzaoui (Editor). An Expanding World: Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1998.
This volume examines the role of textiles within the expanding global economy in the Age of European Exploration. Major themes include: the opening of new markets and responses to competition in the cloth trade, evolving techniques and modes of production, and changes in the patterns of consumption of local and imported cloth in a comparative, cross-cultural context.
The “Other Tuscany”: Essays in the History of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena during the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries
Thomas W. Blomquist (Editor), and Maureen Mazzaoui (Editor). The “Other Tuscany”: Essays in the History of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena During the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. Medieval Institute Publications, 1994.
The papers in this volume are designed to offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony.
The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600
Maureen Mazzaoui. The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
This book traces the dynamic advances in textile technology and changes in the structure of demand that accompanied the rise, in the late Middle Ages, of an Italian industry geared to mass production of cotton fabrics. The Italian manufacture, based on borrowed techniques and imitations of Islamic cloth, was the earliest large-scale cotton industry in western Europe. It thus marked a pivotal stage in the transmission of the knowledge and use of this textile fibre from the Mediterranean basin to northern Europe. The success of the Italians in creating new markets for a wide variety of products that included pure cotton, as well as mixed fabrics combining cotton with linen, hemp, wool and silk, permanently altered the patterns of taste and consumption in European society. Cotton, in various stages of proceeding, was at the heart of a complex network of communications that linked the north Italian towns to the source of raw materials and to international markets for finished goods. In the developing urban economy of northern Italy, cotton played a role comparable in magnitude to that of wool and shared with the latter certain basic features of early capitalistic organization.
History Courses Taught
- History 115 – Medieval Europe 410-1500
- History 121 – The Economic Development of the Western World to 1750
- History 200 – Historical Studies – Topics: “Medieval Warfare”
- History 321 – Economic Life in Medieval Europe
- History 333 – The Renaissance
- History 600 – Advanced Seminar in History
- History 707 – Early Modern European History 1500-1789 – Topics: “Renaissance Italy”
- History 807 – Seminar in Medieval History