Early Modern Economic Research Articles

Joost Hengstmengel, Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought, New York: published by Routledge, 2019, 257 p.

Joost Hengstmengel, Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought, New York: published by Routledge, 2019, 257 p.

Opportunities And Threats Of Historical Evidence And Data Via Corpus-Based Software: A Case Study On Gerard Malynes

The aim of this paper is to exploit the informative nature of datasets that can be created from corpus-based software to explore specific phenomena in early modern specialized discourse, and to corroborate the adoption of the same software for historical analysis. Particular relevance will be devoted to the special nature of historical evidence, which has caused critical issues in the reliability of the data collected for the purpose of historical investigation of English. Spelling variation, in this sense, is one of the most crucial problems of Early Modern English, and this has often affected the reliability of data to be collected via software, especially when statistical findings are involved. The normalisation of historical texts has contributed enormously to make texts better readable for historical corpus analysis; and, consequently, to improve the accuracy and manipulation of data. Moreover, several tools used in corpus linguistics have benefited from the normalisation of spelling variants in the same terms, e.g. part-of-speech taggers for historical variety. This case study will attempt to explore the data retrievable from corpus-based software like VARD, #LancsBox and CQPweb, and to use them to corroborate a preliminary analysis of early modern economics discourse in two treatises written by Gerard Malynes in 1601 and 1623.

Salvation into Nation: Topic Modeling Early Modern Economic Writings

Early modern economic thought is often left out of histories of economic thought, but it was an important inflection point in the development of the modern science of economics. Using network clustering and topic modeling, this research describes the subjects covered in the economic literature of the early modern era and how they change over time using a sample of 2,353 economics texts written from 1550 to 1700s. Topic modeling of the corpus produces sixty-six distinct topics. These topics are clustered using network science methods that reveal five main themes: trade, politics, travel, religion, and husbandry. Longitudinal analysis of the prevalence of topics shows increases in politics and decreases in travel, religion, and husbandry. The results also allow a more precise sense of when those shifts take place than has previously been established, implying that computational methods hold great promise for revealing new information and insights about the evolution and transformation of economic thought over time.

Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought

Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought

Review of Joost Hengstmengel’s Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019, 248 pp.

Review of Joost Hengstmengel’s Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019, 248 pp.

Between Religion and Economics: Towards a Shift of Paradigm in Early Modern Economic Literature

At the beginning of the early modern age, philosophers, religious and political thinkers writing on economics had to deal with categories that were still based on the religious certainties of the medieval West, and with a paradigm built on Aristotelian dialectic between oikos (the family economy) and chrèmata (wealth). From this frame, articulated and innovative investigations on the contemporary economic world were born in the late Middle Ages of Europe: but up until the late seventeenth century, at least, the Aristotelian paradigm remained a rigid cage for most of the writers. Yet, both the impact of some theoretical work on the relationship between religion and economy, and some significant changing in European scenario started to break this cage. Evidence of a shifting of paradigm could be detected even in Counter-Reformation authors like the Italian Giovanni Botero.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Early Modern Economics, Comedy, and Point of View in Lazarillo de Tormes

Este trabajo propone que el análisis detenido del uso de una determinada terminología económica en dos episodios del primer tratado de Lazarillo de Tormes, el de las medias blancas y el de la longaniza y el nabo, indica que el texto es tanto una obra de entretenimiento cómica como una sátira de los mercaderes-banqueros que formaban parte de la burguesía ascendente de la Castilla de mediados del siglo XVI. Así, Lazarillo emplea el humor y la ironía para desarrollar, no una celebración de la incipiente burguesía castellana, sino una sátira de la clase financiera por su avaricia e hipocresía.

Quixotic Economy: Comedy, Romance, and Early Modern Economics in Don Quijote

El discurso de la reforma socio-económica de la temprana modernidad, el arbitrismo, constituye un elemento fundamental de la poética cervantina en Don Quijote. Introducida desde el principio de la narración como parte de la caracterización del hidalgo alocado, la materia económica hace contrapunto paródico al romance caballeresco, función burlesca que mantiene hasta el final de la historia. No obstante su función prioritariamente cómica (de acuerdo con la teoría literaria de la época), en determinados casos, como la historia de Dorotea, el discurso económico se combina con el del romance tradicional en un híbrido narrativo que presagia la novela moderna.

Before the Tragedy of the Commons: Early Modern Economic Considerations of the Public Use of Natural Resources

Abstract This article distinguishes between the precise legal and economic approach to the commons used by Hardin and many other modern commentators, and the broader post-Hardinian concept utilized in environmentally-oriented discussions and aiming to limit the use of the commons for the sake of preservation. Particularly in the latter case, it is claimed, any notion of the tragedy of the commons is distinctly a modern twentieth-century one, and was foreign to the early modern and even nineteenth-century outlooks. This was true of the early modern mercantilists, and also of classical political economists such as Adam Smith and even, surprisingly, Malthus, as well as of Jevons and his neoclassical discussion aimed at maximizing the long-term use of Britain’s coal reserves. One intellectual who did recognize the problematic possibility of leaving some tracts of land in their pristine condition to answer humanity’s need for a spiritual connection with nature was J. S. Mill, but even he regarded this as in essence almost a utopian ideal. The notion of the tragedy of the commons in its broader sense is therefore a distinctly modern one.

Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) by Daniel Jütte (review)

Reviewed by: Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) by Daniel Jütte Dean Phillip Bell Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) Daniel Jütte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. 420 pp. In this revised dissertation, Daniel Jütte provides an impressive study of an emerging theme that allows him to explore a broad range of intriguing and important issues in the history of early modern Jewry and early modern society more generally. Focusing on the meaning, function, and dissemination of what he terms the economy of secrets, Jütte offers well-crafted insights into Jewish economic and cultural history at the same time that he provides new conceptual frameworks for understanding interactions between Jews and Christians. Jütte’s theme is particularly significant as Jews were often seen to possess and utilize secrets (endowing them with perceived negative qualities as well as a certain degree of power). Indeed, the early modern [End Page 173] concern with Judaizing, the phenomenon of crypto-Judaism, and the perception by early modern Christians that Hebrew was a secret language—one that made kabbalah and other Jewish intellectual and practical systems appear simultaneously foreign and magical—fit well into the conceptual structure outlined by Jütte. Jütte pays particular attention to early modern economics, politics, and technology, allowing him to engage more traditional themes such as state formation, the court, and growing interest in arcane knowledge, as well as more recently developed topics such as early modern categories of knowledge, communication, and the development of the concept of the “public.” The volume includes a rigorous review of scholarship on the theme of secrecy and evinces a deep familiarity with an impressive array of studies and themes in early modern history. Jütte places the notion of secrecy in its philosophical and theological context, but he is careful to maintain focus on the practical implications of secrecy (with attention to the economic and political uses of secrets). In reviewing the various facets of secrecy in early modern society, Jütte quite naturally begins with an overview of alchemy, an activity that occupied Christians as well as Jews. Here Jütte covers the basic ground by reviewing some of the central figures that have been discussed in the secondary literature. He next turns to medical arcana, examining various salves and cosmetics and, more menacingly, accusations of Jews concocting poisons for a variety of purposes. Jütte also gives ample space to discussions of cryptography, espionage, and the procurement of information, as well as the development of and traffic in technology (for both civil and military purposes). In the latter category he presents an intriguing range of Jewish personalities involved with weapons and other military technology. Jews, like other early modern people, were also involved in what appear to us today to be more fanciful engagement, speculating and trafficking in magical potions and products. Logically, Jütte next turns to Jewish involvement with and perceived mastery of magical arts and sorcery, the quintessential secrets. In discussing the economic dimension of the arcane, Jütte profitably examines the world of the political court, paying particular attention to alchemy and the related activities of metallurgy and currency production as well as financial reform in the nascent states. In his extensive fifth chapter, which covers some 140 pages, Jütte turns to the little-studied but intriguing figure of Abramo Colorni (1544–1599), fashioned to some extent by himself and his contemporaries as a professor of [End Page 174] secrets (legitimated for some by his Jewish background). Jütte reconstructs an extensive biography, reviewing along the way Colorni’s intellectual development and migrations before serving as an engineer at the court in Ferrara. Known particularly for his work on weapons, Colorni was a mechanical expert with technical know-how, and for Jütte a classical representative of an individual expert in the economy of secrets. He reflects for Jütte the fine lines separating science and magic, astrology and palmistry, mathematics and mysticism, and practice and theory in the early modern world. Colorni was familiar with Christian theology, and his own work was received far beyond...

Perspectives Raised by "Industrious Revolution" Concept on Understanding Early Modern Economic Histories of East, South-East and South Asia, Europe and Russia

Perspectives Raised by "Industrious Revolution" Concept on Understanding Early Modern Economic Histories of East, South-East and South Asia, Europe and Russia

:Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru

In Colonial Habits Kathryn Burns transforms our view of nuns as marginal recluses, making them central actors on the colonial stage. Beginning with the 1558 founding of South America’s first convent, Burns shows that nuns in Cuzco played a vital part in subjugating Incas, creating a creole elite, and reproducing an Andean colonial order in which economic and spiritual interests were inextricably fused. Based on unprecedented archival research, Colonial Habits demonstrates how nuns became leading guarantors of their city’s social order by making loans, managing property, containing “unruly” women, and raising girls. Coining the phrase “spiritual economy” to analyze the intricate investments and relationships that enabled Cuzco’s convents and their backers to thrive, Burns explains how, by the late 1700s, this economy had faltered badly, making convents an emblem of decay and a focal point for intense criticism of a failing colonial regime. By the nineteenth century, the nuns had retreated from their previous roles, marginalized in the construction of a new republican order. Providing insight that can be extended well outside the Andes to the relationships articulated by convents across much of Europe, the Americas, and beyond, Colonial Habits will engage those interested in early modern economics, Latin American studies, women in religion, and the history of gender, class, and race.

As Good as Gold: The Mobile Earth and Early Modern Economics

The writer reinterprets Thomas More's Utopia through an examination of its historical context. She examines the relevance of this passage in the context of developments in modern astronomy, and the way in which an argument of economic origin would be adapted to the cosmological debate. She focuses on how the traditional interpretation of the perfection of the heavens and the corruption of the earth, expressed by the general human preference for gold over iron, was subject to serious examination just before and immediately after the publication of Copernicus's On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. She argues that the passage is part of a larger discourse proper to both astronomy and economics.

Presidential Address: Questions About China's Early Modern Economic History That I Wish I Could Answer

I am greatly honored to have had the opportunity to serve as president of the Association for Asian Studies during the past year, and I am cognizant of the distinction of this afternoon's occasion. This being Washington, where everything is “political”—even more so perhaps than in Beijing—my original thought was to deliver a political sermon on a theme something like “Bush in China.” In fact, I found a possible text for my homily: a book published in Philadelphia in 1865 by a Presbyterian minister, Charles P. Bush, entitledFive Years in China; or, The Factory Boy Made a Missionary: The Life and Observations of Rev. W. Aitchison. But the Reverend Mr. Bush's hagiographical account of the life of William Aitchison, once a missionary to heathen China, was of little help; and I quickly decided that my talents as a fabulist of this variety were exceedingly limited. Hence the quite different fables to which I shall expose you today.

Early Modern Economic England

Early Modern Economic England

Early Modern Economic England

Early Modern Economic England