Adam J. Davis. The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce, and the Rise of the Hospital.

Abstract

Adam J. Davis’s The Medieval Economy of Salvation locates the twelfth- and thirteenth-century hospital movement at a nexus between the medieval transition from gift to commercial profit economy and its concomitant “charitable revolution,” whose spirituality transmuted almsgiving to the poor into “loans to God,” with redemptive reward monetized as interest. This juxtaposition is not newly discovered, nor is the author’s assertion that evidence of such gifts and countergifts between donors and hospitals challenges previous historiographical assumptions that the commercial profit economy had fully replaced the gift economy. In his 1978 classic Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, Lester Little pointed out that “Largess no more disappeared after 1050 than did plundering. It remained a hallmark of the life led by the European aristocracy, and as a model for the life of successful merchants and professionals. It was to be seen not only in their clothes, their homes, their gifts, and their entertainments, but in their works of charity and support of religious institutions. What remained of the gift-economy behaviour was thus complementary to commerce; it no longer opposed, or restrained, commercial activity” (8). With respect to hospitals in particular, Little wrote: “Consistent with the general scholastic theory on the efficacy of good works, philanthropy thus held one of the keys to the justification of profit-making. The small-scale, local pawnbroker continued to be harassed by officials, but the merchant-bankers were well on their way to assuming their role as patrons of charity. The proliferation of various types of hospital is one of the leading manifestations of the new style of philanthropy” (213).