The idea of chance, and more specifically, distinctive ways of managing chance, played a decisive role in shaping Renaissance Florentine culture, humanist philosophy, everyday Florentine practices, and Florentine social institutions. Humanist discourse around the notion of fortuna labored to reconcile the evident existence of fortuitous events with Christian understandings of the orderliness and goodness of the world. With Alberti and Machiavelli, chance becomes more capricious and less embedded within a specifically Christian cosmology, pointing the way to more modern understandings of the interplay of contingency and agency. Meanwhile, we see significant management of risk in commercial life, modifications to the rule of selecting office-holders by lot in political life, and techniques for managing the fatefulness of social interaction within Florence’s patronage-based social system, all of which suggest the importance of chance in structuring key Florentine social institutions. Overall, Florence exhibited neither primitive nor fully modern methods of theorizing chance, complicating simplistic binary understandings of what was in fact a complex cognitive shift across historical epochs.

机会的概念，更具体地说，是管理机会的独特方式，在塑造文艺复兴时期的佛罗伦萨文化、人文主义哲学、佛罗伦萨日常实践和佛罗伦萨社会制度方面发挥了决定性作用。围绕财富概念的人文主义话语努力将偶然事件的明显存在与基督教对世界秩序和美好的理解相协调。有了阿尔贝蒂和马基雅维利，机会变得更加反复无常，也不再嵌入特定的基督教宇宙学，为更现代的理解偶然性和能动性的相互作用指明了道路。同时，我们看到商业生活中的重大风险管理、政治生活中抽签选择公职人员的规则的修改，以及在佛罗伦萨以赞助为基础的社会系统中管理社会互动的命运的技术，所有这些都表明了重要性构建佛罗伦萨主要社会机构的机会。总体而言，佛罗伦萨既不展示原始的也不完全现代的理论化机会的方法，