Antonino Pierozzi was born into a family that was both “prosperous and pious.” His father, Nicolò Pierozzi, belonged to the prestigious guild of jurists and notaries (11-12). From the opening pages, this exceptionally valuable and meticulously executed edition and translation of the six chapters of Antoninus’s Summa (269-519) devoted to economic issues affecting both the upper and lower social strata of fifteenth-century Florence underscores a crucial—yet too often overlooked—connection: the relationship between the familial and social backgrounds of late medieval theologians and Scholastics and their socio-economic analyses, including their understanding and classification of economic sins and moral transgressions. The ability to attend to the concrete historical identity of these authors and texts—crucial for understanding the development of Western economic thought and its languages—lends a distinct depth and specificity to the analysis of Antonino’s economic perception of his contemporary reality.
The economic dimension present in Antoninus’s work—especially in his Summa—is rightly interpreted by the author as an expression of the fundamentally pastoral character of what the Florentine bishop left behind in writing (“Antoninus was...a pastor before all else,” 37). It is therefore no coincidence that the sections of the Summa antoniniana devoted to topics such as “just price,” usury, mercantile conduct, and workers’ wages are framed in explicitly didactic terms.
In Antoninus’s work, one finds a distinctive transformation of the earlier scholastic tradition in economic matters (103ff., 187ff.), a transformation that historiography has, by and large, overlooked. The economic material he drew upon—from a wide array of authors often simplistically grouped together under the vague and misleading label of “Scholastic”—undergoes a significant reconfiguration in his hands. These sources included the penitentiary Raymond of Peñafort, the canonist Henry of Susa (Cardinal of Ostia), the theologians Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, the preacher Bernardine of Siena, and, through the latter, the Franciscan rigorist Peter John Olivi.
In Antoninus’s text, this heterogeneous body of thought—carefully reconstructed and retraced by the author—is reshaped into a coherent and semantically unified discourse. It emerges as a structured and transmissible body of doctrine, poised to enter the subsequent discursive tradition that, in the second half of the fifteenth century, was in the process of taking written form as pre-modern economic thought.
It is nevertheless possible to question whether what, according to Joseph Goering and Odd Langholm, constituted the crucial starting point of the economic discourse of theologians, canonists, Romanists, and moralists can truly be reduced to a “prescriptive motive” capable, in itself, of giving “impetus to the scholastics’ descriptive economics” (127).
As the author’s refined analysis demonstrates—particularly with regard to the complex definition of the so-called “market price” (136ff.)—the linguistic alchemy of the “Scholastics,” who differed widely in origin and intellectual formation, gave rise to a diffuse and often contradictory verbalization of market dynamics. In all its ambiguity, this discourse was capable of relativizing the very notion of an abstract and inflexible economic justice, instead giving shape to an economic rationality that was highly circumstantial and acutely sensitive to the qualities of the persons and goods involved within the relational system constituted by the markets. It therefore appears anachronistic and methodologically imprecise to diminish, as much of earlier historiography did, the rationale of medieval economics by reducing it to a supposedly uniform moral and prescriptive impulse—an interpretation clearly contradicted by the complexity of the economic writings produced between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.
Their semantic architectures were, to a significant extent, unintentional: shaped less by any coherent doctrinal blueprint than by the very form and transmission of textual units that, from one author to the next, were recomposed, fragmented, and reassembled. The result was an extraordinarily intricate and internally contradictory mosaic—one that was only centuries later, and mistakenly so, interpreted as a systematically coherent body of doctrine. After all, the medieval “Scholastics” bore no resemblance whatsoever to the moralizing priests and friars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor is it possible to equate the subtle and often ambiguous relationship between ecclesiastical and lay people in the Middle Ages with the modern or contemporary divide between clergy and secular society.
The author’s command of this methodological framework—further enhanced by a meticulous examination of the codicological tradition, essentially defined by the five autograph manuscripts of the Summa—enables him to deliver a detailed and perceptive analysis of Antoninus’s text. A rich and carefully structured apparatus of footnotes, complemented by highly valuable appendices (notably Appendix II, Sources and Parallel Passages for 2.1.16, p. 551ff.) and a precise index, support this work. Through these tools, he deftly brings to light the linguistic and doctrinal elements that shape, organize, and lend coherence to the treatise.
This close textual analysis makes it unequivocally clear that one of the defining features that renders the economic sections of Antoninus’s Summa a pivotal component of the economic lexicon shaped by medieval Scholastics—perhaps even more so than the achievement of a “great economic thinker of the Middle Ages,” as De Roover claimed—lies in those passages devoted to articulating the criteria for determining the value of exchangeable goods (130ff., 211ff.), as well as in the treatment of money and commercial justice (145ff.)
Here again, the identification of an intellectual tradition—extending from Olivi to Bernardino—which informs Antonino’s Summa with both a refined awareness of the complexity inherent in processes of price formation and a conceptual lexicon adequate to articulating the productivity of “capital,” as well as with the recognition of the impossibility of determining punctualiter the price of an exchangeable good, allows the author to bring into sharper relief the depth, coherence, and systematic character of the Florentine bishop’s reworking, integration, and reconfiguration of this inherited tradition. Indeed, Antoninus’s capacity to rework the economics he inherited from the Franciscan and Dominican theologico-economic tradition depends, as the author clearly shows, on his deep immersion in the complexity of a socially diverse and multifaceted world—namely, that of Florentine society in the first half of the fifteenth century.
Antoninus’s attention to “the moral life according to the different states of life or status in which people could be placed,” an attention that takes concrete form in his treatment of how economic activity is embedded in the practices of temporal lords, soldiers, doctors and scholars, advocates and procurators, merchants and workers (61), that is, traders, shopkeepers, and manual workers (176ff.), conveys an important lesson to the reader of this book: economic ideas and doctrines, as they appear in academic histories of economic thought, are in fact abstract recapitulations and recodifications of a semantic labyrinth shaped over centuries by the deep interplay between the diverse, and not always consistent, verbalizations of concrete human economic interactions and the fluidity of lived economic experience.
In conclusion, this volume constitutes a significant scholarly contribution, advancing our understanding of medieval economic languages and lexicons by situating them within their proper historical and semantic contexts, rather than construing them as merely rudimentary antecedents of a subsequently developed “economic thought.”