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Legal Plunder - Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Hardcover)
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Legal Plunder - Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Hardcover)
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As Europe began to grow rich during the Middle Ages, its wealth
materialized in the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of
ordinary households. Such items were indicators of one's station in
life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs of rank. In a
world without banking, household goods became valuable commodities
that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and resellers
sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation.
Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure
that debtors paid their due. Focusing on the Mediterranean cities
of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder explores how the newfound
wealth embodied in household goods shaped the beginnings of a
modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The vigorous trade
in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
entangled households in complex relationships of credit and debt,
and one of the most common activities of law courts during the
period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to
march into debtors' homes and seize belongings equal in value to
the debt owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy,
cogs in a political machinery of state-sponsored plunder. As Daniel
Smail shows, the records of medieval European law courts offer some
of the most vivid descriptions of material culture in this period,
providing insights into the lives of men and women on the cusp of
modern capitalism. Then as now, money and value were implicated in
questions of power and patterns of violence.
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