Money Matters: Labor, Commerce, and the Politics of Inclusion Before C.1250

Abstract

There is a standard view in scholarship on medieval thought that the reintroduction of Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy in the mid-thirteenth century occasioned a radical and rapid conceptual shift in economic ideas. The proposed paper argues that this view is in need of revision. While certain elements of technical economics awaited the emergence of university-based scholasticism, there were already thinkers who engaged systematically and cogently the temporal impact of the technological, commercial, and fiscal changes experienced by European society prior to c. 1250. In particular, the essay will examine two important political theorists, John of Salisbury and Brunetto Latini, who were unaware of the full range of Aristotle’s “practical” philosophy but who nevertheless sought to address the relationship between new economic realities occasioned by such changes as they affected the political conditions of Europe.