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Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.3 (2001) 607-658



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Risky Business:
Theological and Canonical Thought on Insurance from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century

Giovanni Ceccarelli
Università L. Bocconi-Milano
Milan, Italy


More than forty years ago Lucien Febvre, in a brief but rich article, claimed that a proper history of insurance should not only cope with economy but also with conceptions of religion and nature. Discussing the problem within the wider framework of "besoin de sécurité," a need for security that characterizes every society, he suggests a fascinating parallel between material safety (insurance) and spiritual safety (salvation). Febvre claims that the development within western European society of this need for security into a juridical institute, such as insurance, has to be accompanied by a parallel "transfert de ciel à terre"; it was necessary that, during the Middle Ages, an idea of nature in which God controls all future events be replaced by new conceptions in which mankind could play a relevant role in governing natural events. The French historian, echoing Weberian theories, sees in the emerging spirit of capitalismthe main cause of this shift. In his view, money is the medium by which Western society seeks to protect itself from the constant threats of an otherwise unpredictable nature. Security can be bought and sold. 1

Ten years later Jacques Le Goff offered another fundamental contribution to the understanding of the interaction among religion, economy, and the conception of nature in the Middle Ages. The development, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, of a new idea of Time strictly follows the "transfert de ciel à terre" paradigm suggested by Febvre. From an attitude of superstition and passive submission to God's will, Western society moves to the new ideology of homo faber, to a different conception of the relationship between mankind and nature. In Le Goff's view this shift is closely connected to the culture of merchants, a culture that, due to the stimulus of the circulation of money, is dominated by quantification: Time is rationalized because it can be bought and sold. Although the French historian [End Page 607] argues that this new idea is elaborated by laymen in opposition to clerics, at the end of his study he leaves an open question: Did theology play a role in this ideological shift? Le Goff suggests two lines of research. First, the scholastic debate on usury in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The traditional idea of Time might have been affected by the analysis, made by university masters, of the multitude of contracts in which the repayment of a loan is anticipated or deferred. Second, the relationship among God, nature, and mankind begins to be modified by masters in Paris in 1277, after the condemnation of many deterministic theological propositions. 2 A new natural philosophy is founded in Oxford and Paris, a philosophy in which, through the use of mathematics and geometry, quantification becomes crucial. 3 Recent research seems to answer Le Goff's open question. Joel Kaye establishes a strong connection between thirteenth century theological thought on economics and the development of new "protoscientific" conceptions in fourteenth century natural philosophy. 4

The trajectory of these studies suggests that a new analysis of the thinking of theologians and canonists on insurance may contribute to further clarification of how economy, religion, and science interacted in late medieval and early modern society.

The only two studies devoted to the topic, two brief articles by Pier Giuseppe Pesce and Christoph Bergfeld, fail to examine this interaction across disciplines. Although Pesce studies a large number of sources and so establishes a solid point of departure for further research, his analysis is primarily concerned with the fundamental but limited problem of whether insurance is licit in moral and religious terms (liceity). 5 His study seems to be affected by the historiographical approach suggested in the late fifties by John W. Baldwin and John T. Noonan, a model in which theological and juridical thought on economics emerges as an exception to...

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