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.

Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies researches the development of knowledge economies in Early Modern Europe. Starting with the Southern and Northern Netherlands as important early hubs for marketing knowledge, it analyses knowledge economies in the dynamics of a globalizing world. The book brings together scholars and perspectives from history, art history, material culture, book history, history of science and literature to analyse the relationship between knowledge and markets. How did knowledge grow into a marketable product? What knowledge about markets was available in this period, and how did it develop? By connecting these questions the authors show how knowledge markets operated, not only economically but also culturally, through communication and affect. Knowledge societies are analysed as affective communities, spaces and practices. Compelling case studies describe the role of emotions such as hope, ambition, desire, love, fascination, adventure and disappointment – on driving merchants, contractors and consumers to operate in the market of knowledge. In so doing, the book offers innovative perspectives on the development of knowledge markets and the valuation of knowledge. Introducing the reader to different perspectives on how knowledge markets operated from both an economic and cultural perspective, this book will be of great use to students, graduates and scholars of early modern history, economic history, the history of emotions and the history of the Low Countries.

Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.

Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern teachers and pupils must begin with the sobering realization that the field includes many books that the German word Lehrbuch and its English counterpart do not call to mind. The early modern classroom was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in individual scholars' libraries and museums, and transformed by the same printers, patrons and vast cultural movements that altered the larger world it served. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the Jesuit College, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe, took shape; the curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods in radically novel ways. By doing so, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the tacit knowledge that made their work possible. This collected volume presents case studies by renowned experts, among them Ann Blair, Jill Kraye, Juergen Leonhardt, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer and Nancy Siraisi.

This book presents and explores a challenging new approach in book history. It offers a coherent volume of thirteen chapters in the field of early modern book history covering a wide range of topics and it is written by renowned scholars in the field. The rationale and content of this volume will revitalize the theoretical and methodological debate in book history. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of early modern book history as well as in a range of other disciplines. It offers book historians an innovative methodological approach on the life cycle of books in and outside Europe. It is also highly relevant for social-economic and cultural historians because of the focus on the commercial, legal, spatial, material and social aspects of book culture. Scholars that are interested in the history of science, ideas and news will find several chapters dedicated to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge and news media.

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the Harvard Art Museums, Sept. 6-Dec. 10, 2011, and the Block Museum of Art, Jan. 17-Apr. 8, 2012.

The new edition of this important, wide-ranging and extremely useful textbook has been extensively re-written and expanded. Rab Houston explores the importance of education, literacy and popular culture in Europe during the period of transition from mass illiteracy to mass literacy. He draws his examples for all over the continent; and concentrates on the experience of ordinary men and women, rather than just privileged and exceptional elites.