Early Modern Debts

Laura Kolb is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College CUNY, USA. She is the author of Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (2021).George Oppitz-Trotman is the author of The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy (2019) and Stages of Loss. The English Comedians and their Reception (2020).

“These well-researched essays make a compelling case for the necessity of exploring early modern debt as a multifaceted cultural practice and add to our understanding of the early modern culture of borrowing and lending. Early Modern Debts, 1550–1700 provides a very satisfying introduction into the cultural history of economic and social bonds in early modern Europe, which both an early modernist and a more general reader will come to appreciate.” (Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Vol. 174 (259), 2022)

• Chapter 1: Introduction – Laura Kolb and George Oppitz-Trotman.- Chapter 2: Debt and Doorways – Lorna Hutson.-Chapter 3: Masters as Debtors of their Servants in Early Modern Brandenburg and Saxony – Sebastian Kühn.- Chapter 4: Debt Culture in Shakespeare’s Time – Lena Cowen Orlin.- Chapter 5: A legal remedy against rent arrears: Landlords’ privilege on furniture in 16th- and 17th-century France – Nga Bellis-Phan.- Chapter 6: Crafting the Hierarchy of Debts: The Example of Antwerp (15th-16th Centuries) – Dave De ruysscher.- Chapter 7: Debt, Trust and Reputation in Early Modern Armenian Merchant Networks – Alexandr Osipian.-Chapter 8: How to Deal with Obligations? Contentious Debts and the Parere of the Handelsvorstand in Early Modern Nürnberg – Christof Jeggle.- Chapter 9: Capillary Obligations: Fletcher’s Island Princess and the Global Debts of the East India Company – Benjamin D. VanWagoner.- Chapter 10: Hypallactic Debt Management: The Rhetoric of Exchange in Wyatt and Shakespeare – Andrew Zurcher.- Chapter 11: Caroline Debt: Shakespeare to Shirley – John Kerrigan.- Chapter 12: Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early Modern England – Laura Kolb.- Chapter 13: Debt and Paradox in the Early Modern Period – Alexander Douglas.- Chapter 14: Self-Love and the Transformation of Obligation to Self-Control in Early Modern British Society – Craig Muldrew.