Dates

Various calendars were in use in seventeenth-century Europe. Though the Gregorian calendar was used in Tuscany, the new year began on 25 March – three months after our own. This was the style known as ab incarnatione (from the incarnation). Only once did I encounter a date taken from the old Pisan calendar which began the new year on 25 March nine months before our own (thus making the Pisan calendar an entire year ahead of the Florentine). For the sake of clarity, all dates here have been given according to our modern calendar, that is the Gregorian calendar beginning on 1 January. The exception to this is dates in footnotes which refer to archival sources, where I have kept the date as it appears on the documentation itself in order that the sources can be securely identified. The sample years examined correspond to our modern calendar years i.e. January–December. I hope that the occasional discordance between the year given in the main text and the year shown in the footnote will not present a problem to the reader.