The early modern period does not have a homogeneous understanding of 'economy'. Rather, multi-layered processes of adaptation, circulation and transformation of economic knowledge can be observed in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. This dynamic is particularly evident in the poetics of genre, but also in religious and gender-specific contexts of order. The project examines the three dimensions of genres, religion, and gender, and takes genres as its starting point: Various literary and non-literary genres, each with different functions, distribute economic knowledge in the early modern period and at the same time stabilize religious and gendered concepts of order. The spectrum of genres to be considered is extremely broad and includes compendia, banns of marriage, didactic poetry, courtly and picaresque novels, sermon literature and hymns, emblematics, travel literature, proverbs, jokes, dialog literature, comedy and tragedy.

The project thus differs from previous historical, cultural and social science-oriented works on economics before 1800 and at the same time complements the few advanced interdisciplinary studies between early modern economic and cultural history as well as the often national-literary limited overview attempts.