Description
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.
Table of Contents
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Note on Currencies and Monetary Values; Introduction; Part I. The Selbstzeugnisse in Context: 1. The Historiographical Context; 2. The Sociocultural Context; 3. The Problem of Merchants' Self-perception; Part II. The Merchants' Selbstzeugnisse: 4. The Selbstzeugnisse at the Center of this Study; 5. Mercantile Honor/Dishonor; 6. Merchants and the Urban Political Elite; 7. Living 'Noblement'; 8. Family; 9. Faith; Part III. Merchants in the Round: 10. Renaissance Men; 11. The Performance of Manhood; 12. Capitalism and Class; Bibliography; Index.
