Hang time: Betting on the future in late medieval Italy

Join us for a conversation with historian of Mediterranean studies, Karla Mallette (University of Michigan), about her research on the Arabic and Byzantine roots of the idea of risk management.

Reservation is required: rsvp@primolevicenter.org

Key components of modern risk management strategies first took shape in medieval Italy – but these innovations drew on much older financial practices in circulation across the Mediterranean. The Latin ancestor of the modern English word “risk” first appeared in Genoa in the 12^th century, in contracts that allocated the financial responsibilities and rewards for trans-Mediterranean trading journeys to investors who stayed on shore. By the end of the 14^th century, in northern Italy, a rough form of probability analysis was used to finesse risk contracts, and by the 16^th century, gamblers were using more sophisticated mathematics to calculate their chances at the gaming table. Historians have traced new words central to these early risk management strategies – “risk” and “hazard” – to Arabic and Byzantine sources, and Arab philosophers used frequency analysis, key to the probability calculations used in risk management, as early as the 9^th century. This talk uses philology and literary history to describe the Mediterranean matrix that produced the risk management regimes of the 12^th -16^th centuries, building on the work of social scientists to explore the strategies that medieval men and women used to bet on the future.

About the speaker

Karla Mallette, a scholar of medieval Mediterranean literatures, is Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (2005), European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (2010), and co-editor (with Suzanne Akbari) of A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (2013). Her most recent book, Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean (2021), won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for best book in Comparative Literary Studies in 2022. She has written numerous articles on medieval literature and Mediterranean Studies. She directed the Global Islamic Studies Center from 2014-2020 and served as Chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan from 2020-2025.

Image:

Majmua-i Hay’a. The Kibla-nûma figures show how to find the direction of the holy Ka’ba (Kandilli Library, MS 198/1, fol. 35b-36a). Manuscripts of Kandilli Observatory. Kandilli Rasathanesi el yazmalari 1: Türkce yazmalar. Project manager Gunay Kut; prepared by Hatice Aynur, Cumhure Ucer, Fatma Buyukkarci Yilmaz. Istanbul: Bogaziçi University Publication, First edition, 2007. Source: muslimheritage.com