Dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata (FISPPA)

French and English abstracts available - Résumés français et anglais disponibles |

Résumé -
Fonctions de la monnaie et formes de paiement en Italie du nord dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle. Les livres comptables de l’Hôpital des Proti de Vicence.
Le sujet historiographique de la monnaie a souvent été traité à l’intérieur de schémas de référence essentiellement dichotomique, qui opposent un pôle monétaire, diversement caractérisé, à un pôle non-monétaire ou naturel. Cependant, l’analyse des livres comptables de l’Hôpital des Proti, un organisme d’assistance de Vicence, montre que, dans la réalité, les distinctions sont beaucoup moins nettes. En effet, ces livres très détaillés permettent de reconstituer un ensemble de formes complexes d’évaluation et d’échange et d’éclaircir plusieurs aspects de l’emploi de la monnaie à l’extérieur du marché. Dans les cas étudiés, l’utilisation de la monnaie de compte comme mesure de la valeur est souvent indépendante de l’utilisation des pièces de monnaie comme moyen de paiement. Paiements en nature et paiements en espèces ne paraissent donc que deux modalités alternatives, dont la coexistence est rendue possible par l’expression des valeurs en monnaie de compte. |

Abstract -
Money functions and forms of payment in Northern Italy during the second half of the 15th century. The account books of the Proti Hospital of Vicenza.
In the historiography of money, scholars have usually used a basically dichotomic approach, opposing a monetary pole to a non-monetary or real pole. Nevertheless, an analysis of the accounts of the Proti Hospital, a charity organisation of Vicenza, shows that the distinction is in fact less clear. The very detailed bookkeeping of this institution offers the possibility to discover a set of complex forms of evaluation and exchange and to clarify how money was used outside the market. In the cases here studied, the use of money as a device for measuring the value of things is often independent from the use of specie as a means of payment. Paying in kind or in specie seems to be an alternative, whose coexistence is possible thanks to the evaluation of things in money of account.

This paper presents some unpublished documents concerning the activity of the Italian architect Lorenzo da Bologna (the renovation of the granary of the Proti Hospital in Bolzano Vicentino, district of Vicenza, and the construction of a new chapel in the rural church of San Fermo) and the painter Bartolomeo Montagna (the decoration of the Proti chapel in Vicenza’s cathedral).

In the last decades, historians have shown that the modern market is rooted in the institutional system created in European towns since the middle ages. This approach leads us beyond the usual opposition between market and society or between public and private market. Indeed, in the medieval and early modern age, the market was part of a wider institutional design of civil life, which had a basic conceptual frame of reference in the notion of the common good, a feature typical of such organicistic and hierarchical societies. This paper explores the process of market construction in the medieval and early modern age. I firstly analysed the role of the market in these societies and then focused on the case of foodstuff provision: a key element of the non-written, ancient pact between rulers and people, based on the assurance of subsistence. As a basis for the study, I employed sixteenth century documents regarding Vicenza, a medium-sized town in the Republic of Venice. These show very clearly that, in general, market and price regulation was not the result of arbitrary interventions by public authorities; on the contrary, it was the result of a process of negotiation, which I call civic bargaining. This process involved—to various degrees—public authorities, landowners, merchants and guilds, and the town’s people, the pursuit of the common good being, in practice, a matter of balancing various needs and interests. Present-day economic and social public policies are, in many aspects, an inheritance of the institutional system created in the medieval and early modern age: knowledge of these origins is useful in the present debate regarding economic versus social development, as discussed at the end of the paper.

This article analyses the structure of the payments made in a village of the Venetian mainland between 1467 and 1500. First, the relative weight of in-cash and in-kind payments, both used to discharge land rents and debts fixed in money of account, is measured. These proportions changed during that period, a feature which is then interpreted with reference to the Venetian monetary reform of 1472: by substituting in-kind for in-cash payments, peasants were able to reduce total payments only to a little extent, in spite of the considerable reduction of the stock of money. What emerges, is not an opposition between a “natural” and a “money” economy, but a coherent economic structure, where the money of account had the function of measure of value. Moreover, in-kind payments were evaluated according to market prices, that is to say, prices which were fixed in transactions where coins were normally used. Thus, far from being two opposite classes of “money”, money of account and coins were strictly connected, not only in the general architecture of monetary systems, but also in the process of fixing the value, and therefore the quantity, of exchanged goods and services. These conclusions suggest that, for a right understanding of the function played by money in early-modern economies, its velocity of circulation should be calculated by comparing the stock of money not only with those transactions which were actually settled in cash, but rather with all those transactions which were settled through the application of monetary values (as economists do for today’s market economies). Indeed, this measure of the velocity of circulation of money embodies the effect of higher or lower in-kind payments. Their increase in the fifteenth-century case previously examined—an increase which made it possible to keep total payments relatively constant, in spite of a reduction in the stock of money—can be interpreted as an increase of the velocity of circulation of money. Finally, this relation between increasing in-kind payments, and increasing velocity of circulation of money, has been singled out as a mechanism which may have been at work during the following century’s price revolution. This interpretation, while not excluding the effect of the progress of commercial and financial techniques on the velocity of circulation of money, refers to practices strengthened over the centuries. It is reasonable to think that the majority of the population resorted to these practices when, in the sixteenth century, the rise of prices and of the volume of exchanges, not counterbalanced by a proportional increase in the stock of money, made more difficult to pay in cash.

French and English abstracts available - Résumés français et anglais disponibles |

Résumé -
L’approvisionnement du marché urbain : conflits et négociations (Vicence, XVIe siècle).
Dans ces dernières décennies, l’opposition historiographique traditionnelle entre un marché « public » et un marché « privé » a cédé la place à des analyses qui ont contribué à resituer la question historique du marché dans le cadre du plus vaste dessein de la vie civile des sociétés urbaines de l’Europe médiévale et moderne. En d’autres termes, le marché n’était pas dans son essence une réalité distincte de la société, soumise à une réglementation plus ou moins lourde selon les circonstances. Il faisait au contraire partie d’un système institutionnel complexe, dont la référence au « bien commun » constituait un fondement essentiel. Cependant, la définition de ce concept n’était pas univoque : à chaque fois, des définitions concrètes et particulières étaient formulées, tenant compte de besoins et d’intérêts divers. Ces dynamiques peuvent être saisies à travers une approche micro-analytique et, dans cette perspective, le cas de Vicence au XVIe siècle est particulièrement intéressant. Dans cet essai nous analyserons dans le détail, sur la base de sources réglementaires, judiciaires et administratives, le cas du commerce du fromage et des autres produits négociés par la corporation des fromagers. L’intérêt de ce cas particulier réside dans le fait qu’il s’agissait de produits qui étaient négociés aussi par les membres d’une autre corporation, celle des revendeurs, et par d’autres vendeurs, plus ou moins directs, qui n’appartenaient à aucune corporation. Cette pluralité de canaux d’approvisionnement donnait lieu à une discipline très complexe et à de nombreux conflits entre les différentes catégories de vendeurs : ces dynamiques constituent donc un point d’observation privilégié sur le processus de médiation entre des exigences diverses, qui constituait l’essence de la définition pratique du concept de « bien commun ». |

Abstract -
Provisioning urban markets: conflicts and negotiations (Vicenza, 16th century).
In the last decades, the traditional historiographical opposition between “public” and “private” market, has been increasingly replaced by analyses that position the historical issue of the market in the context of the wider institutional design of civil life in European medieval and early modern urban societies. In other words, the market was not, in its essence, a reality distinct from society and subject to a more or less strict regulation according to circumstances. On the contrary, the market was part of a complex institutional system, which had a basic conceptual framework in the notion of the “common good”. Yet this concept was not unambiguous, and its practical definition was only achieved in each specific circumstance by balancing various needs and interests. These dynamics can be understood thanks to a micro-analytical approach: in this perspective, the case of sixteenth-century Vicenza is particularly interesting. The trade of cheese and of the other goods sold by cheesemongers will be analysed in detail in this paper, on the basis of normative, judicial, and administrative sources. This particular case proves interesting due to the fact that such goods were sold also by the members of another guild, that of resellers, as well as by other more or less direct sellers, who did not belong to any guild. This multiplicity of provisioning channels generated a very complicated set of rules and many conflicts between the different categories of sellers. These dynamics offer a privileged vantage point to observe the process of balancing various needs and interests, a process which constituted the essence of the practical definition of the “common good”.

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The East India Company completed the last and most important part of its existence during the century between the British military victory of Plassey, in 1757, and the great Indian rebellion, in 1857, against the backdrop of the industrial transformation of Great Britain. Beginning as a simple chartered company for trade with the East Indies, the Company ruled over larger and larger Indian territories, but eventually lost all its prerogatives and disappeared. Against this very same backdrop, British Orientalism followed its own path, initially driven by a political agenda to draw on the sources of Hindu and Islamic right. Its protagonists were servants of the Company and of the Crown in India, in their twofold role of administrators and scholars. The symbolic boundaries of this journey were the founding of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, (created in 1784 to study the history, antiquities, arts, sciences, and literature of Asia), and the approval of the English Education Act, which channelled funds for education in India towards schools adopting English programs, in 1835. The paper investigates the complex relationships existing between these economic, political, and cultural processes.

Abstract -
On the role of merchants in grain provisioning of towns in years of scarcity: Vicenza, 16th–17th century.
The chapter investigates the contracts let by the municipality of Vicenza to private merchants in order to ensure the grain provisioning of the town when normal channels were disrupted. Sources of financing, contract specifications, provisioning territories, commercial networks, distribution strategies, and price policies are discussed in detail. Specific operations conducted by well known merchants, active in other trades, such as Gabriele and Tommaso Barana, Stefano and Giacomo Magrè, Pietro Pizzoni, Girolamo Mazzi, Francesco and Pietro Dal Bo, Andrea Gianfigliazzi, Antonio Zorzi, Ottavio Moro, Francesco Dalla Zucca, Giovanni Maria Mersi, are also presented.

French and English abstracts available - Résumés français et anglais disponibles |

Résumé -
Le prix du bien commun. Taxation des prix et approvisionnement urbain (Vicence, XVIe-XVIIe siècle).
Dès le Moyen Âge, les prix taxés, les prix courants et les estimations des experts constituèrent les trois formes de l’« estimation commune » (communis aestimatio), à savoir la détermination du juste prix grâce à une évaluation collective effectuée au sein de la communauté. Les autorités civiles ne manquèrent pas de justifier la taxation des prix en faisant référence à leur rôle d’interprètes de l’estimation commune, comme le montre l’emploi d’un vocabulaire et de concepts élaborés dans le cadre des doctrines éthico-théologiques. Cependant, la définition de la notion centrale de ces doctrines, celle de « bien commun » (bonum commune), n’était pas univoque : à chaque fois, des définitions concrètes et particulières étaient convenues, tenant compte d’exigences diverses. Dans des contextes socialement très différenciés comme pouvaient l’être ceux des villes, il fallait que les autorités prennent en considération les besoins et les intérêts d’une pluralité d’acteurs. En raison de cette complexité, les formes prises par la taxation des prix et par les négociations qui se développaient autour d’elle constituent un champ d’analyse qui s’annonce très fructueux, si l’on veut comprendre les intrications entre l’histoire des prix et l’histoire des systèmes d’approvisionnement urbain, dans le cadre plus vaste de la vie civile des sociétés médiévales et modernes.

Abstract -
The price of the common good. Official prices and urban provisioning in sixteenth and seventeenth century Vicenza.
Since the middle ages, maximum official prices, together with current prices and evaluations made by experts, have constituted the three forms of the “common estimation” (communis aestimatio), i.e. the quantification of fair price obtained through a collective assessment carried out within the community. Public authorities did not miss the opportunity to justify the setting of official prices by referring to their role as enactors of common estimation, as demonstrated by their use of the vocabulary and concepts elaborated within the framework of theologico-ethical doctrines. Nevertheless, the definition of the central concept of these doctrines, that of “common good” (bonum commune), was not unambiguous: practical and specific definitions were agreed upon on a case-by-case basis, by taking into account different demands. Acting mainly in urban and socially differentiated contexts, public authorities had to take into consideration the needs and interests of a plurality of actors. Because of this complexity, the ways official prices were set, and the negotiations about them, constitute a fruitful field of research and an avenue to understand the links between the history of prices and the history of urban provisioning systems, in the framework of the wider design of civil life in medieval and early modern societies.

The article analyses the formation and the articulation of the network of fairs and markets in Vicenza and its district in late middle ages and early modern times. The economic, social and anthropological distinction between weekly markets and annual fairs, and between public and private market, the interaction in the market squares, the role of public authorities in structuring such spaces, and their intervention in times of scarcity are examined. The use of money and non-market exchanges, especially in the countryside, are also considered.