Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Placing ‘literature’ at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this bookoffers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. Thisbook is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change andexchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless,lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginativekernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to someof its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe theearly modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, betweentechnologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere ofcultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In theprocess, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literarywork to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand,and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.