Early Modern Debts: 15501700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early modern societies. The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; institutional history; colonialism; personhood; interiority; rhetorical invention; amicable language; ethnicity and credit; household economics; service; and the history of comedy. Across the collection, the book reveals debts ubiquity in life and literature. It considers debts function as a tie between the individual and the larger group and the ways in which debts structured the home, urban life, legal systems, and linguistic and literary forms.
Laura Kolb is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College CUNY, USA. She is the author ofFictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare(2021).
George Oppitz-Trotman is the author ofThe Origins of English Revenge Tragedy (2019) andStages of Loss. The English Comedians and their Reception(2020).
Chapter 1: Introduction Laura Kolb and George Oppitz-Trotman.- Chapter 2: Debt and Doorways Lorna Hutson.-Chapter 3: Masters as Debtors of their Servants in Early Modern Brandenburg and Saxony Sebastian Kühn.- Chapter 4: Debt Culture in Shakespeares Time Lena Cowen Orlin.- Chapter 5: A legal remedy against rent arrears: Landlords privilege on furniture in 16th- and 17th-century France Nga Bellis-Phan.- Chapter 6: Crafting the Hierarchy of Debts: The Example of Antwerp (15th-16th Centuries) Dave De ruysscher.- Chapter 7: Debt, Trust and Reputation in Early Modern Armenian Merchant Networks Alexandr Osipian.-Chapter 8: How to Deal with Obligations? Contentious Debts and the Parere of the Handelsvorstand in Early Modern Nürnberg Christof Jeggle.- Chapter 9: Capillary Obligations: Fletchers Island Princess and the Global Debts of the East India Company Benjamin D. VanWagoner.- Chapter 10: Hypallactic Debt Management: The Rhetoric of Exchange in Wyatt and Shakespeare Andrew Zurcher.- Chapter 11: Caroline Debt: Shakespeare to Shirley John Kerrigan.- Chapter 12: Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early Modern England Laura Kolb.- Chapter 13: Debt and Paradox in the Early Modern Period Alexander Douglas.- Chapter 14: Self-Love and the Transformation of Obligation to Self-Control in Early Modern British Society Craig Muldrew.
