An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community by Lianna Farber (review)

REVIEWS 220 terms throughout the work. The footnotes render a final element of confusion by linking to a section of Spanish phrases and religious doctrines in the book’s ultimate pages, rather than appearing at the bottom of the page for the reader’s convenience. Some aspects of Ehlers’s book are slightly irksome, but the problematic instances are minor; the text has a variety of strengths. The third chapter, “Reform by Other Means: The Colegio de Corpus Christi,” is extremely well written , and it illustrates a variety of Ribera’s positive influences in detail. The visual aids between chapters three and four are nicely located and help clarify some Spanish religious processions of the era. Finally, as Ehlers ends his work with a chapter titled “The Ideal Bishop and the End of Spanish Islam,” he fits Juan de Ribera’s role into the broader history of Spain nicely. Taken as a whole, Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia is worth consulting for large or small-scale research projects centering on religious examinations of early modern Spain. LAUREN COKER, English, Saint Louis University Lianna Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2006) x + 235 pp., ill. In An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing, Lianna Farber attempts to break down scholastic theories of trade into their component parts and place them back into their popular medieval contexts to demonstrate the distance between medieval writings on trade and actual trade practice. Farber reveals that value, consent, and community were regarded as essential parts of these economic treatises. Writers on trade from Aristotle and Augustine to scholastic thinkers of the fourteen and fifteenth centuries argued that the assessment of value ensured the equity of goods traded, that consent among traders was thought to ensure lawful trading contracts (as both ignorance and fraud invalidated trade agreements), and that trade in general was understood to buttress community by supplying the things which it lacked. Farber reminds the reader that by the second half of the fourteenth century these three elements had become so common to accounts of medieval trade that Nicholas Oresme could assume them as “uncontroversial evidence” in his otherwise controversial economic treatise De Moneta (37). But, Farber counters that these three notions—value, consent, and community—that remained so popular in treatises on trade were deeply contested in the real world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (2). She seeks to reveal a purely moralized and theoretical status of medieval writings on trade by exploring the notions of value, consent and community in non-trade literature . Farber concludes her study by stating that “Those who wrote accounts of trade did not look around them, realize how the market actually worked, and then run to jot it down. Instead…they thought about how trade should work and what, at its best, it might look like” (185). Late-medieval discussions of value were highly influenced by the writings of St. Augustine. In The City of God Augustine distinguishes between two forms of value: natural value, on the one hand, and economic value on the other. According to this hierarchical system, living and sentient beings were inherently more valuable than the non-sentient objects of God’s creation. Thus Augustine states, perhaps with tongue-in-cheek, that no one should ideally REVIEWS 221 desire food in one’s house more than mice, money more than fleas, or pay a higher price for a jewel than a horse or maidservant. This “absolute” value of God’s creation, however, often stood at odds with the “economic” value that dominated real-world trade where items such as money or grain were commonly treated as more valuable than sentient beings. Turning to the literature of the period, Faber uses Chaucer’s “Shipman’s Tale” and “Franklin’s Tale” and Robert Henryson’s fable “The Cock and the Jasp” to question the scholastic distinction between economic and absolute value in popular culture. Each of these texts shows the difficulty of distinguishing between an absolute and economic value system rendering these scholastic distinctions inapplicable to practical decisions. According to Farber, consent, like value, also proved problematic...