In Fortune's Theater

Abstract

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.

State of the Field: Histories of the Future

“…(2) the claims of divinatory techniques; (3) the daily life, prudential impression of the future that was already very old and (4) the new future which is an unknown and unknowable time-to-come. 50 Similarly, in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War, political precautions for the future, including keeping the peace, co-existed with the belief that the End of times was near. 51 For the First World War period, Sabine Mischner used letters and diaries to lay bare the praxeological conceptions of time and more precisely the construction of shared futures in correspondences between the military front and the home front.…”