1st Edition
Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace
Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the intersection, conflict, and confluence of religion and the market before 1700.
Each chapter analyzes the unique interplay of faith and economy in a different locale: Syria, Ethiopia, France, Iceland, India, Peru, and beyond. In ten case studies, specialists of archaeology, art history, social and economic history, religious studies, and critical theory address issues of secularization, tolerance, colonialism, and race with a fresh focus. They chart the tensions between religious and economic thought in specific locales or texts, the complex ways that religion and economy interacted with one another, and the way in which matters of faith, economy, and race converge in religious images of the pre- and early modern periods. Considering the intersection of faith and economy, the volume questions the legacy of early modern economic and spiritual exceptionalism, and the ways in which prosperity still entangles itself with righteousness.
The interdisciplinary nature means that this volume is the perfect resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars working across multiple areas including history, literature, politics, art history, global studies, philosophy, and gender studies in the medieval and early modern periods.
Introduction
Scott Oldenburg
1. Render unto Caesar: Religious Thought, Trade, and Secular Authority in Groningen during the Dutch Golden Age
David Beeler
2. The Market that Binds Us: Religious Exchange in Medieval Syria-Palestine
Ian R. Simpson
3. King Enrique IV of Castilla and the Christian Underpinnings of His Letter on Trade Fairs
Manuel Ortuño
4. Material and providential economies in Montaigne’s Essais
Sara Aponte-Olivieri
5. "The Inscrutable Customes of the Country": Thomas Roe, Edward Terry, and the Early Indian Marketplace
Maya Mathur
6. "Moving Images": Marketing the Sacred in Viceregal Rural Peru
Sara González Castrejón
7. Sanctity, Anti-Judaism, and the Early Market Economy
Anne L. Williams
8. Timeo hiberos et cruces ferentes: Jesuit Missiology as Iberian Colonialism in Early Modern Abyssinia
Luis Salés
9. Racialized sacred spaces: Studying commodifications of race in Þingeyrar, Iceland (c.1470-1700)
Lorenz Hindrichsen
10. The Miracle of the Black Leg: Medical Knowledge, Race + Territorialization
Cecilio M. Cooper
Epilogue
Kristin M. S. Bezio
Biography
Scott Oldenburg specializes in early modern literature and culture at Tulane University. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare’s London as well as articles on various early modern topics.
Kristin M. S. Bezio is an Associate Professor at the University of Richmond. Publications include Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays; “Munday I Sweare Shalbee a Hollidaye” in Études Anglaises; and William Shakespeare & 21st Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership with Anthony Russell.
