A 2017 workshop held in Amsterdam is the origin of this rich and captivating volume, edited by Inger Leemans and Anne Goldgar. The main title of that workshop singled out the three foci of the volume under review: knowledge, market, and affect. The relevance of these terms, and, most of all, their interaction, has been at the center of important recent studies that made concepts like “affective economies” and “knowledge economy” current among scholars. Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies admirably shows and analyzes the interplay of knowledge, market, and affects. And even if the contributions in the collection are all devoted to Northern and Southern Netherlands case studies, an early modern knowledge hub, the volume is remarkably—and programmatically—global and transnational in its outreach.

The inclusion of the study of affects—desires and anxieties of early modern merchants and consumers, real emotional communities—in the discussion of knowledge economies is particularly generative. Also noteworthy and valuable is the recurring use of visual sources, an aspect common to several essays in the volume, which allow deep understanding of issues central to the Netherlands’ early modern society, relying on pieces of arts that would be normally overlooked when visiting museums. But this attention to visual sources, and material objects at large—emphasized also by the generous apparatus of images throughout the book—is not the only fil rouge that characterizes the volume.

For example, a crucial concept like liefhebbers (amateurs, but also virtuosi), connected both to art and science, is discussed in several contributions. The same is true for prosumers, consumers that helped to shape knowledge, for “wish economy,” and for the delicate balance between secrecy and the public sphere that characterizes knowledge economies. Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies is divided in two parts, the first one “mostly on the knowledge cultures and the emotional drives of actors in . . . knowledge markets” (16), the second on the management of the emotional involvement “in commercial processes” (22). Yet it is true that in spite of this division, which is effective in many ways, the essays in both sections communicate admirably with one another, a fact that the introduction by the curators cogently demonstrates.

In the collection there are articles on the German merchant Hans Fugger and the letters he exchanged with his agents in Antwerp, revealing his anxieties and hopes; on calligraphic enterprises and their aesthetic as much as their colonialist, commercial, and global implications; on the attempts of the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg to import to Wolfenbüttel skilled knowledge from the Netherlands; on the reasons behind the trip to Amsterdam of another German nobleman, Fredrick I of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, ranging between alchemy, war, art, and politics; on the market sensibility and social world of the art amateurs (the above mentioned liefhebbers); on a different community, that of early modern Netherlandish young readers, and the fascinating marketing strategies that presented them books as food; on the collection and spreading of knowledge managed by the Dutch Nordic whaling company and how publishers made the company's reports marketable for a wider readership, exploiting emotional aspects; on a quantitative study on the Dutch book marketplace and the role of innovation (and emotions) in building a knowledge culture; on the connection between seventeenth-century Senecan theater on one side, and anatomical theaters and scaffolds on the other—contexts that shared an emotional spectacularization of the body while also exploring and commodifying knowledge; on the affects and anxieties that accompanied money-handling; on the Amsterdam stock exchange as an affective economy and therefore a place where knowledge of emotions was promoted to obtain commercial success.

Collected volumes are often criticized for lacking internal coherence. This criticism cannot be levered against Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies, a collection that reveals a close dialogue and collaborative scholarship among its authors, built with elegance and intelligence.