Lecture: Trust and Credit. The Mercantile Culture of Risk in Renaissance Italy

A lecture by Nicholas Baker, Macquarie University

Renaissance Italy was a society in which the problems of how to trust and whom to trust presented perennial challenges; yet it also housed a vibrant, transcontinental, proto-capitalist economy that relied on trust for its functioning. This lecture explores how Renaissance Italian merchants confronted and attempted to manage the problems of trust and the particular mercantile culture that resulted from this: a culture that blended apparently modernizing elements – such as probabilistic reasoning – with what appear to twenty-first-century eyes as irrational beliefs, religious faith, and ideas about personal standing. At its center lay new conceptions of time and the future, which provoked anxieties and offered possibilities in equal measure.

This event is part of the NYU Medieval and Renaissance Center Distinguished Lecture Series.

In ENGLISH.

RSVP here.

From Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.