Raving at Usurers pursues an exciting and original project. Its recovery of the ethics of risk is an important contribution to our discussions of morality, literature, and economics in the eighteenth century."" — Wolfram Schmidgen, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England ""Raving at Usurers is a self-declared ... Read more‘contrarian’ reconsideration of the financial revolution of the 1690s. It is also a bold, brilliant, compelling account of the way economics and ethics were gradually torn asunder as ‘risk’ was defined as a threat to self-preservation rather than an opportunity to display obedience to God. This pathbreaking book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of capitalism or to see what we have lost in our collective flight from an ethics of uncertainty."" — Mary Poovey, New York University, author of Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain Show Less