Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France
The Business of Salvation

A re-evaluation of late medieval church courts' role in the enforcement of minor credit through the widespread, frequent excommunication of debtors.

Tyler Lange (Author)

9781107145795, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 March 2016

303 pages, 15 b/w illus. 1 map 17 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.61 kg

'Thanks to an impressive data base derived from sampling three church courts (Chartres, Paris and Montvilliers) including more than 11,000 sentences, Tyler Lange provides us with a useful empirical presentation of the issue, depicting the rise and the fall of excommunication for debt from 1300 to 1600.' Jerome Loiseau, European History Quarterly

Late medieval church courts frequently excommunicated debtors at the request of their creditors. Tyler Lange analyzes over 11,000 excommunications between 1380 and 1530 in order to explore the forms, rhythms, and cultural significance of the practice. Three case studies demonstrate how excommunication for debt facilitated minor transactions in an age of scarce small-denomination coinage and how interest-free loans and sales credits could be viewed as encouraging the relations of charitable exchange that were supposed to exist between members of Christ's body. Lange also demonstrates how from 1500 or so believers gradually turned away from the practice and towards secular courts, at the same time as they retained the moralized, economically irrational conception of indebtedness we have yet to shake. The demand-driven rise and fall of excommunication for debt reveals how believers began to reshape the institutional Church well before Martin Luther posted his theses.

Introduction
1. Church courts and credit
2. The supply of ecclesiastical justice
3. Case studies: demand for ecclesiastical justice
4. A crisis of credit? The Reformation and the early modern world
Conclusion: from church to market
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Church history [HRCC2], Medieval history [HBLC1], European history [HBJD]