New from Harvard University Press:
Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (2016), by
Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard University). A description from the Press:
As Europe began to grow rich during
the Middle Ages, its wealth materialized in the
well-made clothes,
linens, and wares of ordinary households. Such items were indicators of
one’s station in life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs
of rank. In a world without banking, household goods became valuable
commodities that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and
resellers sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation.
Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure that
debtors paid their due.
Focusing on the Mediterranean cities of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder
explores how the newfound wealth embodied in household goods shaped the
beginnings of a modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The
vigorous trade in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries entangled households in complex relationships of credit and
debt, and one of the most common activities of law courts during the
period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to march
into debtors’ homes and seize belongings equal in value to the debt
owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy, cogs in a
political machinery of state-sponsored plunder.
As Daniel Smail shows, the records of medieval European law
courts offer some of the most vivid descriptions of material culture in
this period, providing insights into the lives of men and women on the
cusp of modern capitalism. Then as now, money and value were implicated
in questions of power and patterns of violence.
A few blurbs:
“Full of unexpected insights, this exciting
and innovative social history brings the late Middle Ages to life
through everyday objects that served as the basis of an emotional
package of vanity, optimism, humiliation, and violence surrounding debt
seizures.”—Paul Freedman, Yale University
“A terrific book, rich with well-told
anecdotes as well as smart analytical interventions. Smail makes
ordinary people more than mere onlookers or victims of the long
so-called commercial revolution of Europe.”—Martha Howell
More information is available
here.
