Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe : Change and Exchange

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.

Subha Mukherji is Principle Investigator of the ERC project, Crossroads of

Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature. She teaches English

at the University of Cambridge, UK, and at Fitzwilliam College. She has published

widely on various aspects of Renaissance English literature, interdisciplinary

approaches, and literary epistemologies.

Dunstan Roberts is a Praeceptor in English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,

UK. He has published on various aspects of library history and the history of the

book in the Early Modern period.

Rebecca Tomlin was a Research Associate on the Crossroads of Knowledge

project and an Early Career Fellow of the London Renaissance Seminar. Currently

working on a monograph based on her Birkbeck PhD thesis, she also has an

interest in early double-entry book-keeping. When not researching she works at

a City livery company.

GeorgeOppitz-Trotman was a Research Associate on the Crossroads of

Knowledge project. He has published on diverse aspects of Early Modern culture,

particularly as they intersect with theatre.