Building on the argument of Chapter 5, this chapter argues that the fully developed articulation of a new moral allegory of fortuna developed first in visual culture, connected with mercantile ideas about opportunity. The chapter examines the transformation of the iconography of the figure of fortuna from a distant, regal woman presiding over an ever-turning wheel to a young, alluring, naked woman grasping a sail and offering opportunity to anyone smart, fast, or lucky enough to seize her leading forelock of hair. It traces the development of this new iconography, analyzing the gendered conceptions of temporality that it relied on, and demonstrating the complex variations it which it manifested. The chapter demonstrates that the invention of this new visual image was not a simple linear progression, examining the persistence of elements of the older iconography and the Boethian moral allegory of fortuna in late sixteenth-century artworks. This again reveals the multiplicity and complexity of Renaissance ideas about the future and the absence of a straightforward linear progression from the medieval to the modern.

After gamblers, merchants in Renaissance Italy had the deepest professional familiarity with experiencing the unknown future, in all its risks and potential. This chapter examines how the well-established notion that trust was crucial to the functioning of the premodern economy connected to ideas about temporality and the future. It argues that the experience of trusting strangers and distant agents or business partners was fundamentally a temporal one. The chapter traces the institutions and mechanisms used by sixteenth-century merchants to manage the temporal problems of trust. It also demonstrates the continuing persistence of a providential understanding of the future, based on Christian faith, in mercantile culture, revealing the complex multiplicity of Italian attitudes toward the future.

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.

In the late Middle Ages, Italians used the figure of fortuna understood as working in tandem with divine Providence to discuss the contingency of future events. Presiding over a relentlessly turning wheel, Fortuna provided a moral education for humanity, demonstrating the transitory and ultimately worthless nature of worldly success and possessions in the face of the promise of eternity. This chapter examines the deep foundations of this figure in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (written in the sixth century CE), tracing its continuing influence into the fifteenth century. It argues that the moral allegorical figure constructed by Boethius underwent subtle changes in the works of early Italian humanists. Through a close analysis of several texts written between the mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries, the chapter demonstrates how the bonds that tied the figure of fortuna to Providence began to loosen, laying the foundations for new explanations for future contingency disconnected from the temporality of Christianity.

This chapter examines the field’s double-sided struggle for relevance: How media studies gets lost among academic disciplines, on one side, and how it fails to connect with publics, on the other. Seth Lewis scrutinizes the disconnect between the field of media studies and people’s deeply mediated lived experience. He approaches the topic three ways: First, conceptually, considering what questions scholars are asking and not asking as a way to explore the assumptions, worldviews, and theories driving the research that does and does not get done. Second, methodologically, delving into how scholars ask questions, to which groups of people, and gathering what kinds of data. Third, communicatively, asking for whom scholars undertake their work, looking particularly at how research is being communicated to multiple audiences and with what normative aims. Lewis highlights sources of disconnection by exploring well-researched media topics of central concern to publics – media bias, information inequality, and religious faith. He demonstrates the field’s failure to provide the public with satisfactory responses.

John Jay (1745–1829) was the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and shortly before that coauthored The Federalist with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Earlier, he had been the critical negotiator of the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution on favorable terms, and in 1794 he was the negotiator of the Jay Treaty that averted a new war with Britain. His religious faith has been described by political and legal historians as being a new light “Christian enthusiast” and falling among “the most orthodox Christians.” Jay’s own statements about his faith are consistent with those descriptions. The impact of Jay’s faith on his public service and policy positions generally has not been mentioned, other than his belief in a “great plan of Providence.” However, that impact was express in his antislavery, pro-Native American, peacemaking, just war, natural law, religious freedom, and other beliefs and actions.