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  • Chapter 1 - Medieval Literature’s Economic Imagination

  • from Part I - Histories and Critical Traditions
  • Edited by Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh, Peter Knight, University of Manchester, Nicky Marsh, University of Southampton
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
    Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022, pp 19-32

  • Summary

    The changing structures of what we would now think of as “the economy” during the Middle Ages (c. 450 – c. 1500) left deep and extensive marks on the period’s writing and storytelling. Significantly, this was due to the presence of at least two economic systems developing in parallel: an agrarian-based manorial system and a cash-based commercial system. The chance survival of texts from this period does not provide a unified vision of economics throughout England or even from every century of the medieval period. What texts do survive, however, show us that economics in the literature takes many forms beyond simply the exchange of money for goods and services, the establishment of credit and banking, and the development of complex and varied trade networks. It also appears in how a household is run, in gift-exchange, and even in the language of reckoning of sins with punishment or penance.