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

Nicholas Scott Baker's book explores how merchants and gamblers in Renaissance Italy developed a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable, which laid the foundations for the modern sense of time. It demonstrates how the Renaissance constructed the foundations for this sense of time by developing new conceptions of the past and the future.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 266 pages
Publication date: 21 September 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

This groundbreaking cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy explores the emergence of a novel concept of the future as both unknown and unknowable in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. By examining the intricate interplay between mercantile and intellectual cultures in four major cities—Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan—Nicholas Scott Baker delves into how merchants and gamblers, the forerunners of modern futurologists, interpreted and navigated their own risk-taking and that of others. Through extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not invent the modern notion of time, it laid the groundwork for its subsequent development. The new perspectives on the past and future that emerged during this period shaped the framework for constructing a unified narrative that spans from classical antiquity to the present. Consequently, this book makes a significant contribution to unveiling the historical contingency of our sense of time, which continues to shape our world in profound ways.

Weight: 400g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781108826945