ICS Seminar Series - Vanessa Crosby

Date: Thursday 3 September 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EE.G.02, UWS Parramatta South campus

Vanessa Crosby

The 'Thingness' of Money: Rethinking Circulation and Exchange in Late Medieval and Early Modern Economies

Abstract 

The recent "material turn" in the humanities has uncovered the rich social and cultural biographies of material things. Largely unexamined in these accounts is the thingness of money. Hard cash is positioned as neutral, instrumental and fundamentally resistant to symbolic meaning. However, examination of late medieval and early modern practices involving currency suggest that we cannot take money at face value. Literature, art, and theological discourse point at once to a deep disquiet surrounding the cash economy and the emergence of new discourses of moral value and social reputation that relied upon the symbolic and instrumental capacity of currency and a range of new financial instruments such as notes of credit and bills of exchange. This was, after all, the period in history when money could be used to purchase prayers and indulgences, and moral debts could be settled in cash.

This paper looks at the circulation of goods and money beyond the boundaries of the market through an examination of late medieval merchants' preparations for death. Complex processes of negotiation and improvisation were necessary for merchants to operate between competing and often contradictory notions of value that underpinned the spiritual and commercial economies. Drawing on the evidence of wills, religious texts, popular literature and funerary art it will trace out the "spiritual economy" which created mechanisms for exchange between the living and the dead, and between the earthly and supernatural realms. It is in the interstices between the "modern" and the "traditional", the new regimes of market exchange and the old ways of gift-giving, the thingness of money emerges in ways that challenge previous models of circulation and exchange.

Biography

Vanessa Crosby recently successfully defended her doctoral dissertation "Do ut ores: Merchants, Memorials and the Economy of Salvation in Late Medieval England" in the Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern University. Research on the project was supported through the generous support of Northwestern University's Graduate School Travel Grant program, the Mellon-Medieval Cluster Dissertation Writing Grant and the Getty Research Institute's Scholars' Program.