Merchants Attitudes to Work (Journal of Medieval History 2001) (original) (raw)
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'They Are the Treasure of the Commonwealth': Franciscan Charisma and Merchant Culture in Medieval Barcelona., 2023
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been a truism that the emergence of Protestantism was the main cause of the development of capitalism. However, a careful analysis of primary sources, especially in Latin countries, shows a quite different reality. Three centuries before the emergence of Protestantism, the Franciscans generated a discourse that made it possible to begin to legitimize the commercial practices that would later enable the emergence of capitalism. Based on these premises, this article aims to explore the discursive and juridical primary sources of medieval Barcelona—especially the testimonies of the Franciscan intellectual Francesc Eiximenis and merchant wills—to provide relevant new data and interpretations of how Franciscan charisma brought about a better understanding and legitimization of mercantile work. I intend to use the concept of charisma to better understand the great paradox of how those who aspired to a life of extreme poverty—the Franciscans succeeded in legitimizing the work of those who aspired to a comfortable life, namely, the emerging merchant group. The merchants provided the Franciscans with the material capital necessary for their establishment in the city, while the Franciscans granted the merchants symbolic capital that was indispensable for the development of their mercantile work, social recognition, and religious legitimacy.
2011
This dissertation presents a study of culture and politics in the city of Florence between the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. It questions the long-held assumption that the years around 1400, commonly referred to as the age of "civic humanism," ushered in a new era of unbridled classicism and the reign of a powerful merchant oligarchy. This dissertation instead maintains that many of the cultural and political changes that scholars associate with the early Quattrocento had their roots firmly entrenched in the preceding century. In particular, this study argues that certain elements of medieval culture, notably the intellectual attitudes and preoccupations of the merchant of the Middle Ages, endured and continued to find expression in the Florentine Quattrocento. It also contends that the rise of the "Albizzean" oligarchy constitutes the revival of an oligarchic program which surfaced throughout the fourteenth century under the banner of guild corporatism.
Economic History Review , 2017
Medieval merchants and money honours the career of James Bolton. It examines many of the topics studied by Professor Bolton over the years, including credit, money supply, trade, and immigration. At the core of the book is, as the title indicates, the medieval merchant. The focus is, however, more precisely on the medieval English merchant and on the city of London. The essays are detailed archival pieces reflective of Bolton's fine work. Collectively, they give a nuanced portrait of the English merchant and his milieu.
in "Growing in the Shadow of an Empire. How Spanish Colonialism Affected Economic Development in the World (XVI th - XVIII th cc.) edited by Giuseppe De Luca and Gaetano Sabatini, Milan, Franco Angeli editor, 2012
This essay aims at comparing some Piedmontese and Lombard merchant- entrepreneurs during the seventeenth century. A new mercantile figure emerged in the Duchy of Milan, between 1630 and 1640, and in the Duchy of Savoy, be- tween 1660 and 1690, who both had strong common traits. The processes which led to this similar transformation are quite different in the two cases. In Piedmont, the affirmation of a new kind of merchant was strongly influenced by a changing institutional context, while in Lombardy the economic actors fit to the changing context provided by the pace of the international market. We are going to exam- ine the hypothesis that the different institutional decisions – or rather the different economic policies – had different effects over the long period. On the one hand Piedmont favoured a general renewal of its economy focused on silk production which, afterwards, limited other opportunities of development; on the other Lom- bardy encouraged a mercantile reorganization – mainly centred on market forces – which was able to guarantee a more evident distinction within the entire produc- tive system.
Italian businessmen played a key role in both international trade and finance from the Middle Ages until the first decades of the seventeenth century. While the peak of their influence within and beyond Europe has been thoroughly examined by historians, the way in which merchants from the Italian peninsula reacted and adapted themselves to the emergence of greater commercial and financial powers is mostly overlooked. This collection, based on a vast variety of primary sources, seeks to explore the persisting presence of Florentine, Genoese and Milanese intermediaries in some key hubs of the Spanish monarchy (such as Seville, Cadiz, Madrid and Naples) as well as in eighteenth-century Lisbon. The resilience of powerless merchant nations from the Italian Peninsula in the face of increasing competition in long distance trade is deconstructed by analyzing the merchants’ relational dimension and the formal institutional resources they found in the host societies. By offering new insights into the mechanisms of circulation of men, goods and capital throughout the Iberian world, this book will contribute to better assess the polycentric nature of the Spanish monarchy and, more in general, the complex system of commercial exchanges in the age of the first globalization. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire.
The goal of this paper is to consider how work discipline and trade discipline intertwined, from the angle of a specific and situated practice: the theft by workers and artisans also known as embezzlement. What I wish to argue is that, both for the Lombard authorities and for the merchants, theft within the silk industry was not, as we might expect, a problem of surveillance of the workspace as much as it was a problem of trade regulation.