Hardback : $197.00
This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy argues that a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable emerged in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Exploring the rich interchanges between mercantile and intellectual cultures underpinning this development in four major cities - Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan - Nicholas Scott Baker examines how merchants and gamblers, the futurologists of the pre-modern world, understood and experienced their own risk taking and that of others. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not create the modern sense of time, it constructed the foundations on which it could develop. The new conceptions of the past and the future that developed in the Renaissance provided the pattern for the later construction a single narrative beginning in classical antiquity stretching to the now. This book thus makes an important contribution toward laying bare the historical contingency of a sense of time that continues to structure our world in profound ways.
This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy argues that a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable emerged in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Exploring the rich interchanges between mercantile and intellectual cultures underpinning this development in four major cities - Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan - Nicholas Scott Baker examines how merchants and gamblers, the futurologists of the pre-modern world, understood and experienced their own risk taking and that of others. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not create the modern sense of time, it constructed the foundations on which it could develop. The new conceptions of the past and the future that developed in the Renaissance provided the pattern for the later construction a single narrative beginning in classical antiquity stretching to the now. This book thus makes an important contribution toward laying bare the historical contingency of a sense of time that continues to structure our world in profound ways.
Introduction: Histories of the Future; 1. Experts in Futurity; 2. The Future in Play; 3. Trust in the Future; 4. The Mercantile Vocabulary of Futurity in the Sixteenth Century; 5. The Renaissance Afterlife of Boethius's Allegory of Fortuna; 6. The Emerging of a New Allegory in Mercantile Culture; 7. The Shifting Image of Fortuna; 8. The Separation of Fortuna and Providence; Conclusion: Time and the Renaissance.
This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking explores how a new concept of the future emerged in Renaissance Italy - and its consequences.
Nicholas Scott Baker is Associate Professor of History at Macquarie University. He is the author of The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550 (2013), several articles and book chapters, and co-editor of two volumes of essays on Italian Renaissance society and culture.
'Drawing on gamblers' cards and dice, merchants' ledgers and
letters, artists' canvases, and humanists' treatises, Baker
recaptures Renaissance Italians' evolving view of the
future. Day-to-day uncertainty and unpredictability was
financially threatening but culturally liberating. Vividly
written, innovative, and utterly persuasive, In Fortune's Theater
is the new model for tracing the social roots of intellectual
change.' Nicholas Terpstra, author of Religious Refugees in the
Early Modern World
'An impressive account of conceptual change in early modern Italy.
By close analysis of evidence ranging from books on gambling and
insurance to merchant letters and humanist writings, Nicholas Scott
Baker recalibrates concepts of time, fortune, and the future to
describe an unpredictable and risky new world.' Alison Brown,
author of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici and the Crisis of Renaissance
Italy
'How did Renaissance Italians understand the future? This simple
yet striking question is at the heart of Nicholas Scott Baker's
intriguing new book … [which] creates a fresh synthesis by making
connections between phenomena not often pictured together.' Suzanne
Sutherland, H-Net (H-Italy)
'Combining an intellectual history of ideas with a
cultural-anthropological analysis of everyday life, Baker succeeds
in showing how complex ideas and thought processes, like the slow
germination of the concept of the unknown and unknowable future,
interacted, in a reciprocal way, with the daily exchanges of
commerce and gambling.' Michele lodone, Renaissance and
Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme
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