Table of Contents

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.

Promotional Information

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

'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