In Fortune's Theater
Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy

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 (Author)

9781108843881, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 July 2021

320 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'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

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.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD]