Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn ed. by Rory Naismith, Martin Allen, Elina Screen (review)

ENTERPRISE & SOCIETY 234 and corrupt officials used military assistance as an excuse to engage in trade at a time when intercolonial commerce in Asia was forbidden by Portugal’s Spanish monarchs, and how these clandestine networks persisted and were instrumental in ensuring Macau’s loyalty to the new Braganza dynasty after 1640. Chapter Six illustrates how Macau’s ability to adapt to Chinese imperial bureaucracy and social networks ensured a Portuguese presence in the territory, while providing ideal conditions for the practice of corruption, in this case the cover-up of the murder of two Chinese men. The conclusion helps to flesh out the implications of the various personal trajectories scrutinized in the book and the types of corruption they embody in relation to patronage and social networks—and how these are affected by and in turn shape institutions: commercial networks, cross-cultural communication, and exchange. It is refreshing to see the fruit of archival research being integrated in this analysis, even though the emphasis on informal networks is not a novelty. Myrup’s decision to structure his book in three parts around broad geographical areas can be questioned. In terms of coverage , what of India and Africa, namely Angola and Mozambique? It would have been preferable to organize the book differently, given that some of the issues he explores are not specific to the geographical areas examined. These observations should not detract from the quality of the book. It is engagingly written and lively, and Myrup has the talent to bring figures who encapsulate the issues he addresses to life. Catarina Fouto King’s College London E-mail: catarina.fouto@kcl.ac.uk doi:10.1017/eso.2016.58 Published online December 5, 2016 Rory Naismith, Martin Allen, and Elina Screen, eds. Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. xxxiii + 646 pp. ISBN 9781409456881, $154.00 (cloth). In the decades around AD 1000 the coinage of England was issued with a regularity and consistency unique in the Western world. While the currencies of Islam and Byzantium underwent frequent interruptions and changes in standards, and those of the rest of Europe were subject to a continued debasement of silver content and localization of issues, English coinage maintained a steady standard of fineness and weight and became the basis of new coinages across an arc of Film and Book Reviews 235 northern Europe. This coinage formed the focus of the research of Mark Blackburn (1953–2011), who abandoned successive careers in the law and in the City to devote himself to his long-time personal interest in numismatics; at the time of his early death he was Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals of the Fitzwilliam Museum and a lecturer at Cambridge University. The twenty-five contributions to this memorial volume by Blackburn’s colleagues and students serve as an excellent overview and updating of the state of research on the coinage that helped England establish itself as an economic power in the later Middle Ages. The English silver penny grew out of the post-Roman coinage of Merovingian France, which was based on gold and had no subsidiary denominations and thus was an insufficient basis for a monetized economy. In the course of the seventh century, gold denominations experienced a rapid debasement that resulted in silver coinages on both sides of the English Channel, with the most common type represented by virtually indistinguishable issues from English and Frisian mints. The volume’s contribution by D. M. Metcalf, “Thrymas and sceattas and the Balance of Payments,” focused on these early issues, continues this scholar’s efforts to extract broad economic implications from technical numismatic indices, reaching conclusions that have been challenged as overly ambitious by some scholars (including Blackburn), but provocative and enlightening by others (including the present reviewer). The apparently loose control of minting of the silver coinages of the eighth century was brought into centralized royal control in England and the Carolingian Empire by parallel reforms of Offa and Charlemagne, respectively, shortly before AD 800. Several articles in the volume, most notably two by Simon Coupland, elucidate the Carolingian coin reforms and their aftermath, but little attention...