Tag: Medieval Economics – General

1449 - Medieval Workshop - by Petrus Christus
Articles

Did Purchasing Power Parity Hold in Medieval Europe?

This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing power parity held in Europe during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

The Money Changer and his Wife (1490).
Articles

Measuring the Value of Things in the Middle Ages

The difficulty of understanding the value of things in the Middle Ages is one of the obstacles to our understanding of economic life in that era. The issue is first of all associated with the ways medievalists quantify and use numbers. Value was first investigated when studying prices in the 19th century, as a prerequisite to any knowledge of the economy.

Articles

John of Freiburg and the Usury Prohibition in the Late Middle Ages: A Study in the Popularization of Medieval Canon Law

In this dissertation I provide an edition of the treatise on usury (De usuris, bk. 2, tit. 7) contained in the Dominican friar John of Freiburg’s (d. 1314) Summa confessorum (ca. 1298) – a comprehensive encyclopedia of pastoral care that John wrote for the benefit of his fellow friar preachers and all others charged with the cure of souls.