Money and its use in medieval Europe (review)

180 Reviews evident and there is little scope here for adding theory to stylistic insights. The most interesting point has potentially to do with gender, but arrives by way of Bernstein so bound up with class that its impact is somewhat obscured. Overall, the eclecticism of Spearing's book raises a major methodological issue. H o w are medievalists to behave if we wish to keep up with theory without adopting a theoretical position of our own? There is a narrow line between good will and dilettantism. Spearing treads it with relative success. What matters here, however, is less the specific applications of theory than his resolve to discuss Chaucer and Langland, dliterative poetry and early romances, in the scope of the same book and in a way that opens traditional skills to current concerns. Some readers will feel that he goes too far, others that he goes nowhere near far enough. But that is the lot of the endangered liberal everywhere. If Criticism and Medieval Poetry was a definitive book of the 1960s, Spearing has given us its sequel for the late 1980s: less confident, less unified, more open. David Lawton Department of English University of Sydney Spufford, P., Money and its use in medieval Europe, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1988; pp. xiv, 467; 35 maps, 9 tables, 4 graphs; R.R.P. A U S $ 180.00. This is a very important book which brings together the work of numismatists and economic historians. In the past, historians have made use of the work of numismatists and vice versa but there has never been an attempt to recount the history of money and its place in the evolution of the medieval European economy. For this reason, Spufford's book will remain a standard work of reference for many years lo come. Its price is prohibitive but it will be a necessary addition to the shelves of students of the medieval economy and will certainly be a required acquisition for libraries. In some respects the story Spufford relates is a familiar one: the gradual disappearance of gold, silver, and bronze coinages in the West to the end of the sixth century; the revivd of a silver coinage under the Carolingians linked to the exploitation of the mines at Melle, near Poitiers; the impact of the huge payments of Danegeld in denuding Western Europe of coin; the enormous expansion of minting accompanying the economic expansion of the West from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, tied to silver from distant Tashkent and from Goslar in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, to silver from Freiburg and Friesach in the late twelfth century, and from Jihlava, Brskovo and Kutna Hora in the thirteenth; the gold of Kremnica and Senegal, and silver from Bosnia and Serbia alleviating problems of coinage insufficiency in the Late Middle Ages Reviews 181 before the opening of new silver mines in the Erzgebirge and the influx of African gold via Portugd at the end of the fifteenth century. Interwoven with the economic history of medieval mining and precious metd flows is the evolution of coin types: from the silver pennies of Carolingian Europe and beyond, to the grossi of the thirteenth century, the appearance of gold florins and ducats in the mid thirteenth century, and the proliferation of coinage types in the later Middle Ages. Spufford dso makes a great efforts to deal with the uses of money in aU its forms, ranging away from coinage as such to barter, credit, paper transfers, and the use of bullion ingots in particular. In what is, by any reckoning, an exceptiondly difficult task, Spufford has performed weU. The narrative is comprehensible and digestible and there are many insights which are fresh and incisive. However, all readers wiU have their doubts about, and criticisms of, this book. Here are three. First, the book reflects Spufford's previous interests and is primarily about northern and western Europe. The Mediterranean world, particularly Spdn and southern France, and to a lesser degree Italy (especially South Italy) and the later Byzantine Empire, receives less adequate treatment. Secondly, the reliance on secondary sources is too uncritical. For example, when we read that 'the Abbot of Ferrieres...