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Debt in context: kin and commerce in Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2025
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Notes
1 Giovanni Levi, L’eredità immateriale. Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento (Milan, 2020 [Turin, 1985]), 116–31.
2 Craig Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England’, Social History 2 (1993), 168–83; Craig Muldrew, The economy of obligation: the culture of credit and social relations in early modern England (Basingstoke, 1998); Laurence Fontaine, The moral economy: poverty, credit, and trust in early modern Europe (New York, 2014).
3 Muldrew, The economy of obligation; Craig Muldrew, ‘“A mutual assent of her mind”? Women, debt, litigation and contract in early modern England’, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003), 47–71.
4 Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless markets: the political economy of credits in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago, IL, 2000).
5 Chris Briggs and Jaco Zuijderduijn eds., Land and credit: mortgages in the medieval and early modern European countryside (London, 2018); Markus Cerman, ‘Bodenmärkte und ländliche Wirtschaft in vergleichender Sicht: England und das östliche Mitteleuropa im Spätmittelalter’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 2 (2004), 125–48; Markus Cerman, ‘Social structure and land markets in late medieval central and east-central Europe’, Continuity and Change 23 (2008), 55–100.
6 Craig Muldrew, ‘Mistress of her passions: Lady Peregrina Chaytor, estate indebtedness and female credit in early eighteenth-century England’, Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 70, 1 (2022), 41–61; Craig Muldrew, ‘Afterword: mortgages as mediation – between kin and capital’, in Chris Briggs and Jaco Zuijderduijn eds., Land and credit: mortgages in the medieval and early modern European countryside (London, 2018), 309–26.
7 This special issue is the result of the international workshop ‘Debts: the good, the bad and the hidden – bringing family, kin, commerce and consumption debts together’, held in Vienna in 2022. It was organized in the context of the research project ‘The role of wealth in defining and constituting kinship spaces from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century’ (P29394 and P33348), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
8 See, among others, Elise Dermineur, Before banks: the making of credit and debt in preindustrial France (Cambridge, 2025); Fontaine, The moral economy.
9 Dermineur, Before banks, 12.
10 Briggs and Zuijderduijn ‘Introduction: mortgages and annuities in historical perspective,’ in Chris Briggs and Jaco Zuijderduijn eds., Land and credit: mortgages in the medieval and early modern European countryside (London, 2018), 10, 1–16.
11 Margareth Lanzinger and Janine Maegraith, ‘Houses and the range of wealth in early modern gender- and intergenerational relationships’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte / European History Yearbook 18 (2017), 14–34, here 23; Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘À quoi sert la dot? Aliénations dotales, économie familiale et stratégies des couples à Turin au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales de démographie historique 121 (2011), 161–86.
12 On retirement contracts, see, for example, Beatrice Moring, ‘Landed property, power and female old age security in the Nordic countries’, in Margareth Lanzinger, Janine Maegraith, Siglinde Clementi, Ellinor Forster and Christian Hagen eds., Negotiations of gender and property through legal regimes (14th–19th century): stipulating, litigating, mediating (Leiden, 2021), 84–116.
13 Elise Dermineur ed., Women and credit in pre-industrial Europe (Turnhout, 2018).
14 Janine Maegraith, ‘Financing transfers: buying, exchanging and inheriting properties in early modern southern Tyrol’, History of the Family 27, 1 (2022), 11–36.
15 Johannes Bracht, Geldlose Zeiten und überfüllte Kassen. Sparen, Leihen und Vererben in der ländlichen Gesellschaft Westfalens (1830–1866) (Stuttgart, 2013), 199–210.
16 David Warren Sabean, Property, production, and family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), 412; Levi, L’eredità immateriale.
17 Maegraith, ‘Financing transfers’.
18 Dermineur, Before banks, ch. 5.
19 R. W. Hoyle, ‘Some commercial implications of English individualism’, in Chris Briggs, P. M. Kitson and S. J. Thompson eds., Population, welfare and economic change in Britain, 1290–1834 (Woodbridge, 2014), 307–32.
20 Fontaine, The moral economy.
21 Andrea Bonoldi, Siglinde Clementi and Margareth Lanzinger eds., ‘Successioni imprenditoriali’, special issue of Quaderni storici 172, 1 (2023).
22 See, for example, Elise M. Dermineur, ‘The evolution of credit networks in pre-industrial Finland’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 70, 1 (2021), 57–86; Muldrew, The economy of obligation, 103–19; Sheilagh Ogilvie, Markus Küpker and Janine Maegraith, ‘Household debt in early modern Germany: evidence from personal inventories’, Journal of Economic History 72, 1 (2012), 134–67.
23 See also Dermineur, Before banks, 20, who finds that not all evidence for credit transactions have survived.
24 Marcella Lorenzini, Cinzia Lorandini and D’Maris Coffman eds., Financing in Europe: evolution, coexistence and complementarity of lending practices from the Middle Ages to modern times (Basingstoke, 2018).
25 Mischa Suter, Rechtstrieb. Schulden und Vollstreckung im liberalen Kapitalismus 1800–1900 (Konstanz, 2016); Fontaine, The moral economy.
26 Suter, Rechtstrieb; Paul Fischer, ‘Bankruptcy in early modern German territories’, in Thomas Max Safley ed., The history of bankruptcy: economic, social and cultural implications in early modern Europe (London, 2013), 173–84.
27 Eric Häusler, Ökonomisches Scheitern. Solidarische Praktiken in Bern 1750–1900 (Bielefeld, 2023).
28 On peer-to-peer lending, see Dermineur, Before banks.
29 Florian Andretsch, ‘Noble fideicommissa in the Archduchies of Upper and Lower Austria: on the spread, use and regulation of an aristocratic legal institution in the western Habsburg Empire (17th–18th centuries)’, in Maria Lurdes Rosa ed., Privilege, memory and perpetuity: entails and entailment in Europe, ca. 1300–1800 (Coimbra, 2024), 109–42.
30 This became especially clear in Erich Landsteiner’s presentation ‘Big money and cruel kin: the bankruptcy of Jobst and Jacobina Croy in Vienna 1591’ at the workshop held in Vienna in 2022.
31 Dermineur, Before banks, 26, drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and Laurence Fontaine.
32 Briggs and Zuijderduijn, Land and credit; Muldrew, ‘Afterword’; Matthias Donabaum and Janine Maegraith, ‘Verbriefung und Finanzierung von Erbteilen und Ehegütern in unterschiedlichen Rechtskontexten: Niederösterreich und südliches Tirol im 18. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 70, 1 (2022), 21–40.
33 Muldrew, The economy of obligation, here 104; Muldrew, ‘Mistress of her passions’.
34 Although it has occasionally been part of studies of household debt and land transfers, see Ogilvie, Küpker and Maegraith, ‘Household debt in early modern Germany’; Dana Štefanová, Erbschaftspraxis, Besitztransfer und Handlungsspielräume von Untertanen in der Gutsherrschaft: die Herrschaft Frýdlant in Nordböhmen, 1558–1750 (Vienna, 2009).