On November 17, 1400,a Florentine merchant named Ardingo de’
Ricci wrote a letter to some associates in Catalonia, assessing his current
business activity, and concluding: “For these reasons we have not decided to
traffic in these regions… and we have taken the part of navigating in the
Levant, in order if possible not to diminish our resources until fortune
finishes its course.” Christian Bec, from whose study I extract this long lost
instance of the woes of a middleman, has ventured out from the usual pool of
well known literary texts into the lesser known and ordinary texts of merchants
to fix the significance and meaning of Fortuna and its courses in the early
Renaissance; he found that merchants allude to fortune in a number of ways: to
signify a storm at sea, an unexpected turn of events in a war, or, as with
Ricci, a general commercial state.
What interests me in the latter is that clearly, a Ricci
writing a letter to his investors today would use, without thinking, another
word for fortune: market.
The referential range of “market” and “fortune” are, of
course, not identical. In the current vogue for “markets in everything”, we
still don’t see market used as a synonym for hurricane, or for the events of
battle. Nor were the courses of fortune specified in terms of the supply and
demand of commodities. The meeting of our terms is oblique, but not, I would
claim, insignificant. In Aby
Warburg’s seminal essay, the Last Will
and Testament of Francesco Sassetti (1907), Warburg mentions that a commonality
shared by lineage of writers on Fortuna in the ‘antique world’ of the Romans
(from Cicero to Boethius) and the world of 14th and 15th
century Italy (including Ficino) was the set of definitions of fortune in Latin
and Italian, which included not only “”accident” and “property”, but also “windstorm”. For
the see-venturing businessm, these three divided concepts designated much more
only three divided properties of a Storm Fortuna, whose uncanny, unfathomable
capacity for transformation from the demon of annihilation to the generously
bountiful goddess of wealth evoked the elementary restitution of its originally
unified mythic personality under the influence of an old, inherited
anthropomorphic pattern of thought.” Americo Castro, in an essay on Don
Quixote, spoke of the “unit of consciousness” in which coexist “the spritual
and the physical, the abstract and the concrete” – and in this sense, Fortuna
signals that kind of concept-in-practice, one that can be divided up for study
among different ‘disciplines’ but that, in practice, brings together apparently
discrete conceptual moments.
Understanding the overdetermined elements of fortune in the
early modern period helps us get clearer about the Fortuna’s wheel – which
provided as powerful an image by which to analyse the life of production and
trade in the early modern era as the image of equilibrium has done to analyse
the life of production and consumption in the modern era. The the wheel of
fortune lost its poetic power at some point in the late 17th century,
when the first prophets of a new order – William Petty, Pierre Le Pesant de
Boisguilbert, and Bernard Mandeville, among others – devised different images,
organized around circulation. But the history of units of consciousness is not
a history of unilateral continuities and ruptures, any more than the history of
a person is the history of his waking life.
No comments:
Post a Comment