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CHAPTER THREE THE PURSUIT OF DEBT E conomics and enmities often generate overlapping metaphorical fields. In many human societies, the bloodfeud and the vendetta, as sets of exchanges between two parties , are metaphorically configured according to the language and practice of the gift and the counter-gift. "Gifts have been given to you, father and sons alike," remarks Bergthora of Njal's Saga to her sons, speaking of a grievous insult, "and you would scarcely be men ifyou did not repay them."! The gift exchange involves more than just the thing being exchanged , for the giving of the gift creates an obligation that colors the ensuing relationship until the gift is requited. Although the obligation itself may be a material thing, the sense ofobligation, the burden of being the receiver of a gift, is an emotion or a moral sentiment. Positive gifts often elicit emotions of gratitude and respect, though they can also promote feelings of envy or ill-will. Negative gifts, in the form of injuries, are even more efficient in creating ill-will and hatred, though Judea-Christian moral philosophy envisages the heroic possibility that negative gifts might generate love.2 Both types ofgift, positive and negative, lend rich emotional hues to the texture of social relationships. The men and women of medieval Marseille, as seen in the previous chapter, routinely kept track of these emotional hues, in much the same way that they kept track of who owed what to whom, and for much the same reason. In so doing, they acted like accountants of the emotions , toting up the balance sheet of loves and hatreds so as to appraise the value and social worth of the person in question. 1 Njal's Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson (London, 196o), n5. 2 Proverbs 25:21-22; Romans !2:17-2!. [ 133 l To judge by the records of fourteenth-century Marseille, the gift had long since lost ground as the fundamental metaphor of exchange, replaced instead by a slightly different though fully congruent economic metaphor: the relationship of creditor and debtor. Much the same was true for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, where merchants in their libri di ricordanze toted up their credits and debts in much the same way that they wrote out lists of their friends and enemies. This metaphorical shift from gift to credit reflects the fact that the economic world of late medieval Mediterranean Europe had been monetarized for several hundred years. It would be surprising if economic metaphors did not evolve accordingly. In Marseille, the language and metaphor of credit and debt was never used in the explicit Florentine fashion, but economistic ideas nonetheless suffuse emotion talk and never seem to have been far from the minds of litigants and witnesses. Asked in 1403 if he was an enemy (inimicus vel odiosus) of the party against whom he had just testified, the notary Laurens Aycart remarked , "I am hated by no one, nor do I believe that I have any enemies."3 He could just as well have been congratulating himself for being neither creditor nor debtor. The apparent redundancy in what he said seems to suggest that, for Laurens, hatred was like envy or debt in having a single vector, from injured party to injurer. He therefore had to deny a position on both sides of the vector. Although it was convenient in the previous chapter to think of hatred as something shared between two people, and although some records, notably those pertaining to enracinated feuds, do talk this way, many instances ofemotion talk reveal a similar vectoring of hatred that is fully congruent with a metaphor of debt. But the overlap between economics and emotions was more than metaphorical . To begin with, relationships of credit in Marseille were suffused with friendly emotions. The pattern is typical ofmany human societies. Describing a meeting of aJavanese institution called the "rotating credit institution ," Clifford Geertz calls it "a feast, a small gathering of friends, neighbors , and kin," particularly in villages, where it is "commonly viewed by its members less as an economic institution than a broadly social one whose main purpose [is] the strengthening of community solidarity."4 Emotional 3 ADBR 3B r38, fol. 107r, case opened 28 Apr. 1402 on fol. 55r. 4 Clifford Geertz, "The Rotating Credit Association: A 'Middle Rung' in Development ," in Economic Development and Cultural Change 10 (1962): 241-63, here 243· Much of the literature is conveniently surveyed in William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit...

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