Description
Book Synopsis* This is the first accessible discussion of the role of money in the life and economy of the Middle Ages. * The author pays particular attention to the way in which the Church viewed money, and how it taught Christians what attitudes they should adopt towards it and towards the uses to which it could be put.
Trade Review"Le Goff is magisterial in his treatment of medieval documentary sources, and of modern historical debate."
Ashmolean Museum
"Money and the Middle Ages provides those insights into the period which we associate with this master of historical writing."
Times Literary Supplement
"Le Goff has produced a masterpiece: a work which brings together all the complex issues surrounding money and the ways it was conceived and utilized. At the same time he has succeeded in telling a story about individual people and their hopes and fears."
Michael Clanchy, University of London
"In this sweeping essay, at once concise and inventive, Jacques Le Goff returns to a theme on which he has been writing for over fifty years: history, culture, and money. The argument is brisk, the examples wonderful, and his engagement with the material and religious contexts as vigorous as ever. This is still the Le Goff whose history-writing has proved so influential for two generations now."
John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame
"A very clear and authoritative analysis of the perception and use of money across three very turbulent centuries of western European history"
MAKE Literary Magazine
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1. The heritage of the Roman Empire and Christianization
2. From Charlemagne to feudalism
3. The rise of coin and money at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
4. The wonderful thirteenth century of money
5. Trade, money and coin in the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century
6. Money and the nascent states
7. Lending, debt and usury
8. A new wealth and a new poverty
9. From the thirteenth to the fourteenth century: money in crisis
10. The perfecting of the financial system at the end of the Middle Ages
11. Towns, states and money at the end of the Middle Ages
12. Prices, wages and coin in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
Appendix: Was there a land market in the Middle Ages?
13. The mendicant orders and money
14. Humanism, patronage and money
15. Capitalism or caritas?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
