About this Event
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by Martha C. Howell
Using a rare collection of personal narratives written by successful merchants in early modern German-speaking Europe, this study examines how such men understood their role in commerce and in society more generally. As they told it, their honor was based not just on riches won in long-distance trade but, more fundamentally, on their comportment both in and outside the marketplace. As these men described their experiences as husbands and fathers, as civic leaders, as men who “lived nobly,” or as practitioners of their faith, they did not, however, seek to obscure their role as merchants. Rather, they built on it to construct a class identity that allowed them entry into the period's moral economy. Martha C. Howell not only disrupts linear histories of capitalism and modernity, she demonstrates how the model of mercantile honor these merchants fashioned would live beyond the early modern centuries, providing later capitalists with a narrative about their own self-worth.
About the Author
, Miriam Champion Emerita Professor of History, specializes in social, economic, legal, and women’s history in northern Europe during the late medieval and early modern centuries, concentrating on the Burgundian Netherlands, northern France, and Germany. She received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and both her M.A. and PhD. from Columbia. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1989, she taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and from 1989 to 1995 she served as Director of the University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
About the Speakers
is Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. Jones focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present. He has published two books previously, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue and Reckoning with Matter: Calculating, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage.
is Professor of French and History at Columbia University and the current chair of the History Department. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell UP, 2013), Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France(Chicago UP, 2021), and The War on Gender: From the Vatican to the New Global Right (forthcoming with Princeton UP in 2027).
is a professor emeritus of history at Dartmouth College. He is a historian of religion in the high and late Middle Ages, with a special interest in gender, urban history, and the Low Countries. His best-known book is Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); he also co-edited volume IV of the Cambridge History of Christianity, with Miri Rubin (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
is the Janet H. Robb Professor of the Social Sciences and Vice Provost for Research at Barnard College. He just finished a book that is tentatively titled The History of Capitalism in Ten Great Debates.
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Event venue & nearby stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
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