Speaker
Description
This paper aims to provide a broader understanding of money, its role and value as a material object in Renaissance culture. By recounting the material history of a specific artefact, the fifteenth-century Friulian ‘bell of Dante’ decorated with a tercet from Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso and fourteen impressions of gold and silver Italian coins, not only will it offer new insights into a previously neglected practice involving coins, but will also illuminate money's centrality within the sensory world of the Renaissance. Moreover, the comparative study of the use of money, and especially of coinage, in other contemporary rituals in Italy and Europe, will allow us to appreciate people’s behaviour, religious beliefs and attitudes to money in different cultural and geographical areas.
