Gambling provided the most common and ubiquitous means by which Renaissance Italians confronted the risks and the potential of the unknown future. This chapter examines how in the mid-sixteenth century, a small group of authors used their familiarity with games of chance to present themselves as experts in futurity. It argues that they presented the confrontation with the future provided by gambling as a test of character. The ability to master the anxiety provoked by uncertainty and to control one’s emotions in the face of both victory and defeat, they argued, represented an essential attribute for navigating society. Gambling, this chapter demonstrates, provided a sentimental education for life in sixteenth-century Italy: a society built on financial risk taking, and a culture adapting to a new conception of the future as unknown.

Developing the arguments of Chapter 1, this chapter examines the everyday experiences and policing of gambling in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It traces shifting attitudes toward games of chance in both penitential thought and civil regulation. It argues that civil law attitudes toward gambling were structured by the notions of honor and social status held by the homosocial office-holding classes of Italian cities. While these governors understood themselves to possess the requisite social and financial capital to gamble, they continually attempted to restrict the ability of women, younger men, and lower socioeconomic estates to play at games of chance. The chapter also uses artworks and criminal prosecutions to trace resistance to this attitude by the excluded, revealing that the notions of honor, character, and self-control that pervaded elite ideas about gambling penetrated deeply in Italian society, although manifesting in different ways. In both cases, attitudes rested on ideas about what it meant to take chances on the unknowability of the future.