«From heaven to earth»: the developments of insurance
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Abstract
Elaborated by Lucien Febvre in the 1950s, the metaphor of the transfer «from heaven to earth» describes the origins of insurances (understood in their technical sense) between the middle ages and early modern times, as a tangible solution for the need for security which, according to the scholar, until then had been catered for by faith. Scholarly literature on the process through which both practices and insurance science were defined allows us to perceive the intersection of complementary languages which elucidate the tangibility of the need to cope with risk as well as the ecclesiastically derived regulating mechanisms upon which credit relationships, credibility and trust (all essential for relationships among the citizenry to function) were constructed.
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