N.S. Baker, In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge (UK), Cambridge University Press, 2021

“Around the turn of the sixteenth century, Italians began to imagine time-yet- to-come in a way that appears more familiar to twenty-first-century conceptions than the soteriological, divinatory, or anticipatory notions of the Middle Ages” (4). That, in a few words, is the main thesis of Nicholas Scott Baker’s book, which in order to illustrate this change combines an innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy (chapters 1–4), and a stimu- lating analysis of the representation of fortuna among Renaissance humanists, merchants, and artists (chapters 5–8).