Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Book excerpt: Placing ‘literature’ at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.