Description
This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking explores how a new concept of the future emerged in Renaissance Italy - and its consequences.
About the Author
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.
Reviews
'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
Book Information
ISBN 9781108826945
Author Nicholas Scott Baker
Format Paperback
Page Count 266
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 392g