Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe

Little, Lester. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Print.  

Little's monograph is an earlier study of the economic development of the 12th-15th century. As an earlier study, Little's text at times falls prey to the grand historical narratives that Watt castigates, specifically in suggesting that this period is marked by two fuedal ages. For Little, the first feudal age is marked by a gift giving economy and the second by an exchange economy. Little's first chapter opens with the illustrative example of two separate hoards of wealth found within this period. The first hoard of gold is melted down and turned into a new altar to rejoice the glories of God. The second hoard, however, is used to pay for the construction of a new church built by local workmen. In the first example, Little suggests that the transformation of wealth into another form of wealth demonstrates the quid pro quo of the first feudal age, one that privileges the giving of gifts and expected reciprocation to maintain social bonds. The second, according to Little, represents the move to a more commercialized society, one in which the wealth itself is used to raise a church in glory of God but in doing so introduces the wealth from the hoard into the local economy. 

For Little, "life in the new profit economy raised acute problems involving impersonalism, money, and moral uncertainty" (19). As money grew in importance to a wider populace, Little argues that exchange began to supplant certain social hierarchy  responsibilities, and bonds. A knight, for example, could pay a shield tax instead of serving the 40 days of military service required by his feudal oaths, which his lord could use to hire a mercenary in his place. In this case, money literally replaces the knight's feudal oath and makes his military service an exchangeable commodity. Little goes on to suggest that this property leads to social issues ranging to a rise in prostitution, which is aided by the growing anonymity of large urban centers, and the selling of church offices, which is less a matter of a new problem as a new perception of an already regular practice. Little spends his final latter chapters plotting the role of religious orders in this shift, eventually arguing that friars become ever more important in the world changed by the profit economy.