Henry Tann is a History DPhil candidate at Balliol College. His thesis ‘The first capitalists and their horizons’, will explore the cultural history of Italian merchants in the Late Middle Ages. Henry is especially interested in how accounting and mercantile literacy influenced their wider outlooks and in how risk, whether worldly or spiritual, was understood and managed. In Venice Henry will be studying guild statutes and examining the roles played by civic identity and confraternities in shaping the reputations of late medieval merchants.