Early Modern Merchants and Their Books

Early Modern Merchants and their Books offers the first dedicated study of the literary and intellectual lives of the merchants of seventeenth-century Britain. Drawing primarily on unpublished manuscript material, but also on a range of rarely discussed printed texts, the book reveals for the first time the importance of this 'mercantile humanism'. A contribution principally to the field of 'book history', but with significance for early modern literary studies, cultural and intellectual history, global history, and history of science too, this volume examines mercantile account books, letter-books, anthologies, and manuals, as well as mercantile libraries and archives, and mercantile poetic and pedagogical works, to document this now little-known literary and intellectual culture. Working across geographical contexts, as well as institutional structures, the book examines merchants as accountants, record-keepers, authors, collectors, and compilers, and reveals the creative interplay between financial, commercial, administrative, archival, memorial, and devotional categories and practices in the early modern mercantile world. Through a series of mercantile microhistories, each based on a single document or group of associated documents, the book traces the range and extent of this 'mercantile humanism' and identifies its signature textual and material forms, as well as its key subjects and concerns, and some of its most important actors. Early Modern Merchants and their Books in this way challenges long held assumptions about knowledge-making in the seventeenth century and pushes back against equally persistent beliefs about merchants in the period. As such, it not only offers a revisionist history of the early modern merchantry, and a major new account of learning in the seventeenth century, but also constitutes a significant methodological intervention in 'book history' itself.