Markets, Piazzas, and Villages

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Long before natural objects became subjects for experimental study in the laboratory, they had been commodities traded in the marketplace. In the early modern period, as European merchant vessels ventured far beyond the Mediterranean, this marketplace expanded rapidly, thereby increasing the variety and geographical diversity of the commodities traded therein. These changes were vividly reflected in the stockpiling of goods in warehouses for wholesale trade and in the accumulation of exotic natural and artificial objects in museums and cabinets of curiosities. From the gigantic warehouses of Amsterdam and the Hague to the bustling ports of Marseille and Venice, early modern collectors busily gathered specimens of exotic flora and fauna, shells, coral, and other objects from distant parts of the world. The dramatic increase in the pace of trade, population growth, and the rise of credit all led to an expansion of the distribution network: in particular, to a rise in the number and variety of shops. In 1606, Lope de Vega wrote of Madrid, “ Todo se ha vuelto tiendas ” (“Everything has turned into shops”), while Daniel Defoe lamented that shops in seventeenth-century London had spread “monstrously.” The boom in shopkeeping not only increased the diversity of items available to consumers but also created spaces for conversation and for gaining information about natural and manufactured goods. In the early modern period, craftsmen’s shops were also workshops and were thus important sources of natural and technological information. Echoing humanist educational ideals, the young Gargantua of Rabelais’s La vie tres horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel (The Most Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, 1534) visited jewelers, goldsmiths, alchemists, weavers, dyers, instrument makers, and other craftsmen to learn about the properties of things.