The Character and Cultures of Credit in Early Modern Spanish Texts: Matters of Belief, Trust, and Uncertainty

Abstract

The rise of finance casts a long shadow in Iberian print culture. Mathematicians and businessmen understood credit as a matrix of equations that could establish either the fluid functioning of genuine exchange or open a threshold into the realm of the senseless. Thinkers and authors perceived that the power of the imagination penetrates even the skillful techniques of commercial arithmetic. Credit means to believe and give credence. It relies on calculation and abstraction, as well as mechanisms of trust and make believe particular to fiction. Mateo Alemán, Duarte Gomes Solis, and José Penso de la Vega intersect tropes of hope and fear with visions of modernity that speak to myths of restlessness, boldness, and imprudence, together with a rich imagery of intricacy and impermanence. This set of writings examines the puzzling logic of fictitious capital as a means of production and representation. Technical, intellectual, and creative pursuits shaped the extensive debate about credit explicitly or implicitly. For the vexing questions explored are not exhausted by vocabulary, genre, or ideology.