CIDRAL Open Event: Professor Tom Safley (History, University of Pennsylvania) ‘What Ruin? Of Insolvency and Scandal, Fortunes and Families in Early Modern Economic Life’
| Dates: | 4 March 2014 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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Can we speak of "ruin" in economic life and activity? Surely, businesses fail, wealth disperses and individuals suffer. In premodern society, the consequences could be dire: debtor's prison or the hangman's noose. But, ruin evokes the crumbled remains of a bygone age, structures long bereft of occupants and able to communicate their once-upon-a-time forms and functions only indirectly. Is such a term aptly applied to the economic past? By examining a series of early modern bankruptcies and their consequences, I hope to explore not only the contours of failure but the meanings of "ruin."
Thomas Max Safley is Professor of Early Modern European History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. A specialist in the economic and social history of early modern Europe, roughly 1450-1750, he has published extensively on the history of marriage and the family, of poverty and charity
and of labor and business. In addition to writing numerous essays, articles and reviews, Professor Safley is the author of Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest, 1550-1620 (1984), Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (1996), Matheus Miller's Memoirs: A Merchant's Life in the Seventeenth Century (2000), Die Aufzeichnungen des Matheus Miller (2003), Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (2005) and Kinder, Karitas und Kapital (2009/2011). He is co-editor of The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800 (1993) and of Perspectives from the Past (1998), now in its fourth edition and Im Ringen um die Reformation: Kirchen und Prädikanten, Rat und Gemeinde in Augsburg (2011). In addition, he has edited several volumes of essays, including The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief (2003), A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World (2011), The History of Bankruptcy (2013) and Childhood and Emotion (2013). He is currently at work on Mercury in History: Commodities, Economies and Cultures in the Premodern World and Failure at Idria: Business and Bankruptcy in a Capitalistic Age. A regular visiting professor in Europe, Professor Safley teaches introductory surveys of European history and advanced lecture courses on the Reformation, the Baroque, pre-industrial economic history and the early modern period at the University of Pennsylvania.
This event will be accompanied by a masterclass - <a href="http://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:n76-hl9n7buf-7wijsf">details here</a>.
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John Casken Lecture Theatre
Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama
Manchester
