> can't imagine that the proportion of Italy's population that was able to sustain a middle class existence through artisanship was lower in the Renaissance than it is today
I would love to see figures, actually. My gut feeling is it would be lower. The world was overall poorer, and still struggling to even feed itself.
I don't think so, especially considering the plague. The economy was already set up to feed a lot more mouths than survived the plague, and places like Florence were the destination for many of those newly wealthy. The guilds also exercised political power, behaving as organized monopolies. You would think that monopolies are bad for the economy, but they were markedly different from today's monopolies in that their internal organization foreshadowed today's systems of democracy and a strong civil society.
So, to think of this as a golden age of artisanship, and to think that the phenomenon reached even into commoners' lives, is certainly more than mere romanticizing about the past ...though I don't claim to have a good quantitative grasp of it either.
I would love to see figures, actually. My gut feeling is it would be lower. The world was overall poorer, and still struggling to even feed itself.