4 - The Mercantile Vocabulary of Futurity in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Summary

Like the authors on games examined in Chapter 1, sixteenth-century merchants also constructed an identity based on expertise in futurity. This chapter examines how they did so through the deployment of rich, varied, and precise vocabulary for discussing the opportunities and risk of speculating on future profits. It traces the fine-grained way that merchants discussed the passing of time, demonstrating the ways in which they thought about time and risk as commodities that could be weighed and priced. It develops on Chapter 3, however, by showing these same merchants continued to think about the future and nature of the world in profoundly religious ways, complicating notions of straightforward linear progression for medieval to modern notions of temporality.