Title: Money and Finance in Central Europe during the Later Middle Ages, ed. Roman Zaoral
Abstract: As Roman Zaoral, the editor of this interesting collection of fifteen essays, says, ‘the financial history of Central Europe during the Middle Ages has lain outside the mainstream of scholarly interest for a long time’. So it has, and as an introduction for English-speaking historians to the ways in which accounts were kept, taxes levied and credit extended in Poland, Bohemia and Hungary and the surrounding territories, this book goes a long way to rectifying that neglect. Zaoral first presents a short historiography of medieval finance in Central Europe, accompanied by a long bibliography that demonstrates how much research there has been on the subject in the last few decades. The essays are then grouped thematically into four parts: Money and Minting; Medieval Court Funding; Trade and Towns; and Church and Money. In the first, Hendrik Mäkeler presents a new perspective on the Imperial coinage after the introduction of gold coins in the fourteenth century. He stresses the importance of regional money unions, as does Michael North, who argues that, though the debates in the Upper and Lower Saxon Circles (Reichskreise) on coins, mints and exchange rates may look clumsy to the modern eye, they were essential for the institutional reform of the Empire and guaranteed monetary stability within it. In the third article in this section, Martin Štefánik analyses the Kremnica (Kremnitz) book of accounts for 1423–6, which were kept in both Latin and German in a form of charge–discharge accounting. They show how a council of twelve and a notary controlled the town’s financial affairs, and how they dealt with a multiplicity of currencies and the continually fluctuating value of the Hungarian florin.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-11-24
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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