Cultures écrites de l’économie aux époques médiévale et moderne explores how economic documents, even often mundane items such as receipts, can give insight into the cultures that produced them. The cultures examined are mostly French and Italian, and the time period does not go much before the thirteenth century or later than the eighteenth, so “medieval and modern” is more focussed than it sounds. The book’s eleven chapters are divided into three parts and an introductory section. Each section itself begins with a little introduction, written by a separate contributor. Two of the editors, Anne Conchon and Laurent Feller, introduce the entire book with a general introduction.
Jean-François Moufflet and Marie-Françoise Limon-Bonnet, two senior archivists at France’s Archives nationales, follow the introduction with a chapter each about the archive’s holdings. Moufflet discusses medieval holdings and Limon-Bonnet discusses modern holdings, with a particular focus on the example of the minutes of Paris notaries.
The first full section of the book is entitled “Comptabilités et correspondances marchandes,” and it is introduced by Julie Claustre. Much of the overall goal of the book is showing that peoples’ stories can be told through their bills, receipts, and other written evidence of their economic activities, and this first part illustrates that theme most precisely, with a special focus on merchants.
Jérôme Hayez presents the case of L’Archivio Datini in Prato, discussing merchant writings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I was struck by Hayez’s characterization of this study as an “approche ethnographique” (72). I (and many others, I think!) would more readily call the study of everyday documents history, not ethnography, but Hayez’s invocation of ethnography speaks to a high level of confidence in the richness of these documents and how they can show multiple sides of people. Hayez made this comment in the context of debt and other negatives, which display unhappy truths. And, many non-monetary items do appear in economic documents, too. So, I can see how Hayez and others proclaim the potential of mundane economic writings. This does require the society under study to be heavily literate for a full view, but that certainly applies to the merchant communities discussed in this book.
The next chapter is a good case in point, with Louis Bissières writing about the merchant Levi Hollingsworth in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Cultures écrites de l’économie aux époques médiévale et moderne does not aim to compare or contrast the medieval and modern periods as such, and its essays are not particularly “in conversation” with each other. (Each section’s introduction takes on some of that role.) Still, Bissières emphasizes that buying and selling was “une activité d’écriture” above all in the modern period. That is, transactions happen because writing has happened, and writing does not merely record transactions, like how we might think about it during in earlier periods. Bissières ties this to the modern era’s standardizations: a homogenous form of merchant writing makes that writing easier to circulate.
Clémence Pailha rounds up the first section with a thorough chapter on Pierre Pomet’s 1694 book, Histoire générale des drogues simples et composées. This book has an interesting history that includes a Persian translation in the eighteenth century. As a deliberately published work, it clearly differs from receipts and other documents intended for personal use (explored in the rest of this section), but Pailha makes the case that Pomet’s background as a spice trader informs the Histoire générale’s genesis. Especially noteworthy to me was Pailha’s argument that Pomet would use his experience as a trader to give more authority to his claims about drugs and cures, and this would, in turn, serve to guide the market and benefit Pomet. At this point, a contemporary comparison entered my mind: is Mr. Pomet like a semi-retired tech start-up executive who started a podcast to sell “cutting edge” cryptocurrencies and AI products? Pailha does not take such an uncharitable view, though, and emphasizes that Pomet’s writing was often an exploration into new ideas as much as a determined assertion of them.
Marc Bompaire writes the introduction to the second section, “Enregistrer et inscrire: les actes de gestion.” Lise Saussus opens this section with a chapter on the Tannery at Valenciennes, from the fifteenth to sixteenth century. Saussus focuses on receipts regarding succession. This chapter is one of several in this book with lots of quantification, with two graphs illustrating the number of documents and rising prices. Next, Harmony Dewez discusses feudal rents in multiple medieval locations, showing several pictures of the manuscripts. Dewez concludes by echoing previous points about how the research of economic documentation is not just history, and that there are lots of things going on behind the payment of rent.
Multiple authors in the collection highlight when women are involved in the production and transmission of documents. But this theme is Serena Galasso’s focus in her chapter on management and economic writings in late medieval Florence, showing how noble ladies often managed their families’ accounts. More generally, Galasso makes the insightful point that while everyone has heard some discussion of medieval literacy, discussions of medieval numeracy are much rarer. In keeping with the other themes of the collection, she says that quantification is everywhere in medieval lives, as it is in ours, and that this gives “ethnomathématique” (197) a unique ability to peer into the inner lives of people.
These themes continue into the final section of the book, despite its more specialized-sounding title, “Les outils de perception de l’impot.” Patrice Baubeau introduces the section, which begins with Andrea Giorgi’s chapter on the Biccherna in Siena from 1555 to 1786. Giorgi consummately catalogues the material of the Biccherna’s archives, and includes photographs and charts. Next, Romain Saguer examines royal accounts from Roussillon and Cerdagne in the fourteenth century. Saguer’s highly descriptive chapter illuminates the vocabulary and thought processes of the people who created those accounts. The final chapter examines Sardinian maps in eighteenth-century Savoy, written by (appropriately enough, given his name) Sébastien Savoy. This contribution is another filled with numbers, images and detail. Agnès Gramain furnishes the epilogue to the collection, and does well in tying in all the highly specialized chapters together, framing the summary as an argument that contemporary economists should pay attention to the study of economic documents.
When I saw the title Cultures écrites de l’économie aux époques médiévale et moderne, I hoped that it would offer more general insights that would be broadly useful even to me, someone who studies medieval narrative poetry. Instead, the book collects robustly specific studies that will be indispensable for scholars who study the documents under discussion, certainly, but also those who study the economics of the cities during the periods in question.