In his book interrogating capital in the twenty-first century, Thomas Picketty based some of the examples of income inequity and the practices of capitalism in nineteenth-century literature, primarily the works of Jane Austen and HonorĂ© de Balzac , with the argument that these writers âgrasped the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women [⊠in a way] that no statistician or theoretical analysis can matchâ (2014, 2). Reading economic practices as well as theory through literary documents can provide an equally valid means of understanding the impact of economics in even earlier periods. Such a mode of enquiry has been applied to eighteenth-century texts and since around 2000, to early modern texts. But all of these works would thus be read in the context of the capitalist system installed into Western Europe and when the terms of capitalism are established and readily identifiable. The period before the adoption of capitalism as a macroeconomic system for the West (roughly, before 1500) presents difficulties because the terms and practices of this system had not yet been established.
Scholars of medieval culture have been more conversant with the impact of the economic system of feudalism on literary texts and, conversely, with how literary texts illustrate the theory and practices of this system. However, with the development of a culture associated more with buying, selling, debts , currencies, and even insurance, medieval scholars have been less precise or consistent in discussing its impact. Indeed, even the terminology for defining the system has little agreement (whether it is called mercantilism , commercialism, or even pre-capitalism). Literary scholars have often associated this sort of financial behavior with merchants ; although by the fourteenth century, people other than just merchants were engaging in such practices.
Furthermore, just as people in the early twenty-first century are concerned with economic issues, those from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have been no less preoccupied with such matters, albeit not with ready access to information or even the ability to understand the economic system (or competing systems) in which they lived. Medieval literary scholars have since about 2005 sought to explore how issues of commerce and money were reflected in the texts written in this period, just as Picketty argued that such matters are visible in nineteenth -century authors. Scholars such as Lianna Farber, Brian G. Gastle, Roger A. Ladd, D. Vance Smith, and even the editors of this collection , have sought to place these means of enquiry on a broader scale than the works of a single writer. Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland have been read for decades for their critiques of how commercial behavior was impacting traditional medieval culture. John Gower has received less but growing attention in this matter. He also may be the most systematic observer of commercial practices and quite possibly the earliest English writer to thoroughly explore commercial economics , four centuries before Adam Smith did so. The present collection is the first to bring new and established voices together to examine how the works of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers reacted to the economic, monetary, and commercial issues shaping their world. In order to provide a frame to the questions that the chapters seek to answer, two contexts need to be established: the social and the theoretical.
The Social Context
Scholars of economic history usually refer to the period from the 1340s, with the first visitation of the Black Death to Western Europe, and 1500, with the beginning of New World colonization , as marked by a transition from feudalism to capitalism . Yet, this designation is unhelpful, as it is oversimplified. The West continued to have a feudal economy well into the sixteenth century. One could even argue that the first colonists in the Americas sought to enforce a feudal economy rather than a capitalist or even market -based one. Europe may have had areas, mostly in cities , where there existed practices later identified as part of capitalism (such as letters of credit , banks , and an international trading network). But these practices were precursors of a system that Western civilization would not fully construct for another two centuries.
The 1340s were a period when four principal changes (climatic, demographic, political , commercial) caused a major disruption of social structures, from which Western Europe took over 150 years to recover. Each of these shifts resulted from problems that had been brewing for the previous half-century and all came to a head at the same time. The first was climatic. Western Europe had endured several years of bad harvests since 1290, the effects of which stretched food resources and caused periodic starvation. This problem was exacerbated by the second change, which was demographic . The thirteenth century was a productive period in many ways; Western Europeâs population swelled so much as to cause a strain on resources. Landowners found it necessary to divide their properties for their heirs, with the result that many properties became marginal in their ability to be self-sufficient. The early fourteenth-century famines made these marginal freeholds untenable.
The third change was political. The opening of the Hundred Years War initially involved England and France in a damaging conflict that would ultimately engulf Scotland , the Low Countries , and the Spanish kingdoms. The kings of England and France made enormous fiscal demands on their subjects as well as caused catastrophic damage to food supplies when their armies destroyed crops or disrupted trade. The relocation of the papacy to Avignon and its alliance with the French crown was also on track to cause further political divisions of the West through the resulting Great Western Schism and to become a significant fiscal drain on resources.
The fourth change was commercial. The lucrative trading relationships developed separately by Genoa and Venice in the thirteenth century had kept the West supplied with luxury goods, such as spices and fine cloth. These relationships became imperiled when the Mongol Empire fragmented. The Mongols had maintained the integrity of the overland caravan routes from the Levant to China for nearly a hundred years. However, by the early decades of the fourteenth century, the Mamluks took over Egypt , forcing the Venetians to trade only through the port of Alexandria , while the Ottomans secured the Black Sea , confining the Genoese solely to the port of Kaffa. The trading lanes to the West contracted to a trickle. In addition, the popes had placed an embargo against trade with Muslims . The bustling economies of central and northern Italy began to contract. Moreover, the growing trade imbalance between the West and the Levant was causing significant drain of bullion from Europe to pay for the goods that Europeans were importing (Bolton 2012, 232â6). This drain corresponded with a monetary crisis as the sources of silver bullion from which most coins were struck dried up.
Bruce M. S. Campbell sums up the European situation in the middle of the 1340s:
Then, in 1347 the Black Death arrived in Western Europe. The economic and political crises resulting from the mass mortality caused by the pandemic led to a significant rupture in the late medieval world. Demographically, the continent took well over a century and a half to ...In 1346 when the English invaded France , the Scots invaded England, in Florence the Society of the Bardi was declared bankrupt, in the Crimea the troops of Khan Janibeg were besieging Kaffa, the Byzantine Empire was still locked in self-destructive civil war, in Asia Minor Ottoman power was in the ascendant, and in the eastern Mediterranean the Mamluks were poised to capture Ayas in Lower Armenia-Latin Christendomâs economic prospects looked bleak. Currencies had been destabilized and credit exhausted, the volume of international trade was much reduced [âŠ] Economically and commercially an impasse had been reached from which there was no immediate prospect of deliverance. (2017, 276)