This book investigates how work ethics in Europe were conceptualised from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Through analysis of a range of discourses, it focuses on the roles played by intellectuals in formulating, communicating, and contesting ideas about work and its ethical value. The book moves away from the idea of a singular Weberian work ethic as fundamental to modern notions of work and instead emphasises how different languages of work were harnessed for a variety of social, intellectual, religious, economic, political, and ideological objectives. Rather than a singular work ethic that left a decisive mark on the development of Western culture and economy, the volume stresses plurality. The essays draw on approaches from intellectual, social, and cultural history. They explore how, why, and in what contexts labour became an important and openly promoted value; who promoted or opposed hard work and for what reasons; and whether there was an early modern break with ancient and medieval discourses on work. These historicized visions of work ethics help enrich our understanding of present-day changing attitudes to work.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Introduction: Rethinking Work Ethics.- Chapter 2: The Work Ethic in Renaissance Florence: a Study of its Origins.- Chapter 3: Preaching about Manual/Artisanal Labour: A New Focus and Ambivalent Messages (1200–1500).- Chapter 4: Industry, Utility, and the Distribution of Wealth in Quattrocento Humanist Thought.- Chapter 5: Work, Morality and Discipline in Sixteenth-century Geneva.- Chapter 6: Critical Responses to the Humanist Work Ethic: The Image of the Pedant.- Chapter 7: Scholars Working Themselves to Death: Casaubon and Baronio Compared.- Chapter 8: Work and Idleness in Adam Contzen’s Political Oeuvre.- Chapter 9: The Counter-Reformation Concept of Good Labour and the Inculcation of a Catholic Work Ethic.- Chapter 10: Labour as a Form of Charity and Almsgiving in Early Modern Poor Relief.- Chapter 11: Enlightened Women at Work: The Case of Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1770s–1790s).- Chapter 12: Labor ipse voluptas: Virtues of Work in Nineteenth-Century Germany.
About the author
Gábor Almási is Senior Researcher of the
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo Latin Studies, Innsbruck, Austria.
Giorgio Lizzul is Post-doctoral Junior Fellow at the Fondazione 1563, Turin, and Visiting Scholar at the Università di Torino, Italy.
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