Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century
Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought

This book provides perspectives on the ways in which scholastic natural philosophy anticipated and contributed to the emergence of scientific thought.

Joel Kaye (Author)

9780521572767, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 February 1998

286 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.55 kg

'Medievalists have neglected the history of ideas in our generation, but this study shows how it should be revived and practiced.' John W. Baldwin, The American Historical Review

This book provides perspectives on the ways in which scholastic natural philosophy anticipated and contributed to the emergence of scientific thought. Historians of medieval science have hesitated to step outside the sphere of intellectual culture in their search for factors influencing proto-scientific thought. This book searches for influences both within and beyond university culture, and argues that the transformation of the conceptual model of the natural world c.1260–1380 was strongly influenced by the contemporary rapid monetisation of European society. It analyses the impact of the monetised market place on the most characteristic concern of natural philosophy of the period: its preoccupation with measurement, gradation, and the quantification of qualities.

Introduction
1. The economic background: monetisation and monetary consciousness in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
2. The Aristotelian model of money and economic exchange
3. The earliest Latin commentaries on the Aristotelian model of economic exchange: Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas
4. Models of economic equality and equalisation in the thirteenth century
5. Evolving models of money and market exchange in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
6. Linking the scholastic model of money as measure to proto-scientific innovations in fourteenth-century natural philosophy
7. Linking scholastic models of monetised exchange to innovations in fourteenth-century mathematics and natural philosophy.

Subject Areas: Educational: Sciences, general science [YQS], Educational: History [YQH], History of ideas [JFCX], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD]