eNDING hISTORY:

Let's move on to the last of your books on the Middle Ages, Medieval Market Morality by James Davis. What story does this book tell?

This is the only book from the period that I actually work on. I chose this one because the 14th century is an absolutely intriguing time of cataclysmic change. By picking the topic of market morality, James Davis gives us something which engages all those really huge shifts, but gives us a very different perspective on them, and one which shows the ways in which contemporaries weren't only subject to these shifts, but how they engaged their own subjectivity. They're constantly reflecting on the implications of commercialization and rapidly shifting social structures for themselves as moral beings and for their own sense of what it might mean to be a member of a community.

The story of the book quite simply is that it's period when things are changing very dramatically, and he's interested in thinking about the ways in which moral systems were developed to deal with economic changes.

Are we talking about things like the difficulty of running an international commercial system without charging interest on loans, that sort of thing? Is it about the tension between the religious prohibitions on some sorts of activity and practical requirements to breach those requirements in order to make these new emerging systems work?

That's the backstory, or the broader canvas of what he's doing. But his focus is at a more local level. It's about England, and he looks more at humbler kinds of trade. He's interested in bakers, butchers and brewsters and the kinds of trade that went on in local markets. But the conceptual backdrop for that is the broader canvas of theological anxiety about price and lending at interest that you mentioned.

Talking about 'market morality' suggests a morality rooted in the process of the exchange of goods and services. Is he making the point that the morality was changing as a result of the way that commerce was changing? Or is it more about the imposition of things like the 'just price', in other words trying to control the market and fit the exchange of goods and services into a pre-existing moral structure that governs how we should interact with each other?

It's probably a bit of both, probably slightly more the latter. Chronologically, he's doing two things. On the one hand, there's a sense that markets are developing so rapidly that moral, theological and legal ways of thinking about them need to catch up, with a real acknowledgement that the market economy is crucial to the common good more generally. And on the other hand, there is indeed a sense that theological moral thinking about concepts like just price rendered commerce really problematic. What concerns them most, though, is trickery and deception.

Does it tell a story about the relationship between government and commerce as well?

It does, and part of the story is about the relationship between legal regulation and moralizing ways of thinking about it. He finds interesting disjunctions between the two, or at least a sort of slight lag between the two. For example, the assizes are a set of legal regulations about quality and quantity and this sort of thing, but very often, in practice, they seem to be used effectively as a kind of licensing system for brewers and bakers. Whereas the moral standards that might be applied tended to produce much more stringent ways of thinking about the limits to which people should be exploiting what they get up to.

Fundamentally, the point is that over the course the 14th century, there's a real growing awareness that markets are a good thing. At least that's what they reckon. But, at the same time, there's a great deal of anxiety that it can so easily go wrong and that there are moral theological tensions there. So, the book's about the working out of that lapse between the two.

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