Abstract
Christine Desan's Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism provides an authoritative answer to a fundamental question about medieval English money that has puzzled a few scholars, but that has been largely ignored by most: were medieval payments normally weighed or counted? The same question can be expressed differently as: were payments made by weight or by tale at face value; or again, was the value of money determined by its intrinsic content or by royal decree? But why might this curious distinction between counting payments and weighing them matter?
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)