One of the first books I read for a graduate seminar, Craig’s monograph is partially responsible for my continued interest in medieval pilgrimage.  Using feminist theory and narrative to discuss womens’ pilgrimage to saints’ shrines and the miracles attributed to them in Italy, France, Sweden, England, and Germany.  In addition, the Appendix features just under twenty tables and bar graphs.  I am interested in taking that data and plotting it on a map in order to enhance the visual presentation.

Flint, Valerie I. J. “The Early Medieval ‘Medicus’, the Saint--and the Enchanter.” Social History of Medicine 2, no. 2 (1989): 127–45.

	In this article, Flint calls for scholars to study more in depth the relationship between the ‘medicus’ (doctor or physician), the saint, and the enchanter.  While I don’t anticipate studying the enchanter in depth for this thesis, it is important to be aware of his presence in the Middle Ages.  Flint uses Merovingian hagiography from the sixth-eighth centuries as well as engaging with Gregory of Tours.  Her footnotes are chock full of potentially useful sources, including the Life of Caesarus where a doctor, Helpidius, is portrayed as helpless against a demonic attack and requires the aid of a saint (see pg 136, n. 29 of article).

Matteoni, Francesca. “The Jew, the Blood and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” n.d.

	In the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as the “monstrous other” by Christians.  They were erroneously accused of ritual murder and were often made the scapegoats when disaster struck (such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century).  Matteoni explores these accusations of ritual murder and the blood libel legend through the lens of the Jewish minority.  Her main goal is “to look at the alleged bodily evidence of the libel—the blood—and at the controversial way in which it was has been perceived by different groups of people over time” (182).  In short, this article discusses the role played by blood itself and how it was used to portray the stereotypical Jew in the Middle Ages.  While I thoroughly enjoyed this article and Matteoni’s writing style and argument, this particular piece is not going to be useful in my research.  I do, however, plan on tracking down more of Matteoni’s work to see if there is something I can use.

McCleery, Iona. “‘Christ More Powerful Than Galen’?: The Relationship Between Medicine and Miracles.” In Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100-1500: New Historical Approaches, edited by M. Mesley and L. Wilson, n.d.

	This particular article, comparing and contrasting miracles and secular healings, is exactly what I’m looking for in my research.  McCleery goes outside the normal landscape of England to Portugal in order to study three miracle cults:  the cult of Gil de Santarém, the cult of Our Lady of the Olive Tree in northern Portugal, and the Holy Name of Jesus from Lisbon.  Through studying these miracle cults, McCleery asks questions that address how the meaning of words—such as medicine— can change over time, as well as attempting to answer what other methods of research—such as anthropology—can be useful to historians of miracles.  McCleery uses what she calls a “socio-statistical approach” to present her findings.  For example, she provides percentages of important demographics as they relate to each cult:  male vs. female, child vs. adult, the types and kinds of illnesses and diseases reported, town or village of origin, and occupation (if known).  

Metzler, Irina. “Medieval Miracles and Impairment.” In Disability in Medieval Europe Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, C. 1100-1400. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10163754.

	Metzler is interested in figuring out what conditions were considered disabilities in the Middle Ages.  She distinguishes a difference between impairment and disability, writing that “impairment is a physical condition, whereas disability is a socio-economic state” (157).  Aware that she is using a modern-day label for situations that took place centuries ago, she also points out that it is necessary to inquire “whether one can actually refer to medieval people with impairments as ‘disabled’ persons” (157).  Indeed, this is a question I have found myself asking throughout my research—I am hesitant to put a modern label on those who lived so long ago.  Metzler’s research is innovative in that she focuses specifically on disability and impairment.  

Park, Katharine. “The Meanings of Natural Diversity: Marco Polo on the ‘Division‘ of the World.” In Texts and Contexts in Medieval Science: Studies on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday, 134–47. Leiden: Brill, 1997. https://www.academia.edu/2298665/_The_Meanings_of_Natural_Diversity_Marco_Polo_on_the_Division_of_the_World_in_Edith_Sylla_and_Michael_R._McVaugh_eds._Texts_and_Contexts_in_Medieval_Science_Studies_on_the_Occasion_of_John_E._Murdochs_Seventieth_Birthday_Leiden_Brill_1997_134-47.

	While Park’s article on diversity and “the other” may not be directly related to my research, this article does have some similarities to Ephraim Shoham-Steiner’s article “Jews and Healing at Medieval Saints’ Shrines” precisely because of their analysis of “the other.”  Park uses Marco Polo’s travelogue as a lens to study this cultural and social phenomenon, but she also relies on philosophers and writers such as Pliny, Albertus Magnus, and Augustine.  Even though the article itself may not be explicitly relevant, her footnotes will certainly be of use.

Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim. “Jews and Healing at Medieval Saints’ Shrines: Participation, Polemics, and Shared Cultures.” Harvard Theological Review 103, no. 01 (January 7, 2010): 111. doi:10.1017/S0017816009990332.

	This is another article that I thoroughly enjoyed reading—not only for its topic but also for Shoham-Steiner’s clear writing style and argument, which is that Jews were not only aware of the tradition of visiting shrines of Christian saints in hopes for healing, but it is possible they participated as well.  This article will prove useful in my research because it discusses “the other” (in this case, the Jews) participating in a ritual that is typically portrayed as being performed by Christians only.  This new insight—that perhaps it was not just Christians who visited Christian shrines—is intriguing and I would like to pursue this idea further, even if it will only make up a small part of my thesis.

Ward, Benedicta. Miracles and the Medieval Mind ; Theory, Record, and Event, 1000-1215. London: Scolar Press, 1982.
	
In this monograph, Ward uses a more theoretical approach to analyze miraculous events and their corresponding records.  She actually treats miracles as their own kind of theory; her first chapter is titled “The Theory of Miracles.”  In that chapter, she begins with a discussion of St. Augustine, who believed in and recorded miracles.  Ward is not unique in her discussion on Augustine and miracles—other scholars, such as Sumption, Finucane, and Simon Yarrow make it a point to address Augustine early in their monographs.  This makes sense because Augustine was—and still is—one of the most influential Christian authors throughout history.  And as a Church Father (along with the likes of Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), people throughout the centuries have looked to Augustine for guidance and clarification.  Although she was writing just a few years after Sumption and Finucane, Ward staked out a path to a far more nuanced understanding of the role of miracles in medieval Europe—a society which she saw as being far less uniform and instead subject to local variations than her predecessors.  This monograph will be one of the most influential pieces of secondary literature that I will use in my research.

Yarrow, Simon. “Miracles, Belief and Christian Materiality: ‘Relic’ing’ in Twelfth-Century Miracle Narratives.” In Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100-1500: New Historical Approaches, edited by M. Mesley and L. Wilson, n.d.

	As is evident in this and other works by Yarrow, he is influenced by Peter Brown and Caroline Walker Bynum, and interprets these miracle narratives from the twelfth century through the lens of Enlightenment thought—specifically the empiricist philosophy of David Hume.  It is this way that Yarrow introduces the real star of his essay, Guibert of Nogent, a Benedictine monk and historian from the twelfth century.  Yarrow is an important figure because he has surpassed his predecessors, incorporating the best ideas from other scholars of miracles to come to an even more nuanced view of how relics and miracles served different purposes to different people.  I am especially interested in his findings that people within the same society could have diverging understandings of miracles, much less people in different times and places.  This and Yarrow’s other work (listed below) will also be instrumental in my research.


Yarrow, Simon. Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfthcentury England. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford UniversityPress, 2006.
	
This monograph can be read as a direct response to Benedicta Ward (Miracles and the Medieval Mind) and Ronald Finucane (Miracles and Pilgrims).  Yarrow takes issue with both of these authors because in his view they seem to oversimplify their subject matter and in turn do not give the medieval people they study the full credit they deserve.  These are concerns that I hold as well.  Taken together, Yarrow, Ward, and Finucane represent the scholarly debate and dialogue concerning medieval saints, pilgrims, and cures, and this interaction between them will prove useful for my own research.






SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY
Bonner, Gerald, ed. Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede. London: S.P.C.K, 1976.
	
Two chapters in this book appear as if they will be useful:  Benedicta Ward’s “Miracles and History:  A Reconsideration of the Miracle Stories Used by Bede” and Thomas W. MacKay’s “Bede’s Hagiographical Method:  His Knowledge and Use of Paulinus of Nola.”  

Ward takes advantage of theory, anthropology, and folklore to explore how Bede interacted with and used miracle stories to his advantage.  The last section of her chapter gives at least two examples of this.

MacKay relies on textual criticism and hagiography in his chapter in trying to determine what manuscript of Paulins of Nola Bede was working from.  At this point I am interested in how Bede used hagiography, and this detailed analysis of the extant texts possibly available to Bede will assist in that.

Finucane, Ronald C. Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England. London: Dent, 1977. 

Finucane’s 1977 book has been influential to virtually all subsequent scholars of medieval pilgrimage.  The subtitle of Finucane’s work alerts the reader to what he will address:  an analysis of popular beliefs.  He does this by surveying 3,000 posthumous miracle stories using narrative and Cliometrics as his lenses.  Unlike Sumption, Finucane’s focus is mainly on English shrines, and he limits his study to “new” saints whose cults emerged between 1066 and 1300.  Finucane distinguishes these saints—William of Norwich, Thomas Becket, Godric of Finchale, Frideswide of Oxford, Wulfstan of Worcester, Simon de Montfort, Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford, and in France, Edmund Rich and Louis of Toulouse—as “new” because they did not hail from the Anglo-Saxon tradition which flourished prior to the Conquest of 1066.  Like Sumption, Finucane does not address medical pilgrimage directly, but his discussion on the illnesses and diseases suffered by people in the Middle Ages lays the groundwork for scholars such as Irina Metzler and Simon Yarrow.
Finucane’s work was revolutionary not only because of the sheer amount of posthumous miracle stories he studied analytically, but also because he portrayed these findings as popular history.  Thus, his audience would have extended beyond the scholars of his day.  Yet his quantitative analysis proved to be so thorough that future scholars of medieval history such as Valerie J. Flint, Diana Webb, Debra Birch, and Leigh Ann Craig have referenced it in their own research.  Additionally, scholars such as Frederick S. Paxton, Simon Yarrow, and Iona McCleery acknowledge Finucane’s influence by studying how clergy dealt with peoples’ beliefs in miraculous healings. 

Sumption, Jonathan. The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God. Mahwah, N.J.: HiddenSpring, 2003. 

Sumption mainly provides a narrative of medieval pilgrimage with a focus on France and its immediately surrounding countries, which will be helpful in my research.  By using a bottom-up approach—that is, looking at the entire strata of society—coupled with the Annales method of scholarship, Sumption argues that he is able to paint realistic portrait of spiritual life in the Middle Ages.  He does this by drawing heavily on church records, legal documents, narratives, and miracle stories.  However, at 500 pages, his study is so large that by necessity several things are left out.  “This is a long book,” Sumption writes.  “I had no desire to make it longer” (2).  For example, while Sumption deals extensively with Canterbury and Santiago de Compostela, he provides only rudimentary information about pilgrimage to Jerusalem and does not address any of the miracles that have been purported to have taken place at its various shrines.  Even though he does not directly discuss medicine, Sumption set the stage for future scholars to pick up that banner.
 Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

	Quoted at length by scholars since the original French edition was published in 1981, it wasn’t until 1997 that this book was translated into English.  Vauchez’s main focus here is the relationship between clergy and laity and how it informed the social and cultural climate of the twelfth-fifteenth centuries.  He does this by using a source that had not been used before:  “the processes of canonization held between 1185 and 1431 on the orders, or with the consent, of the papacy.  By studying the processes, Vauchez argues that one can determine what was thought of the person being canonized and how the people involved in the process viewed Christianity.  This book will be quite useful in my research, and I expect that as I dig deeper within the monograph I will find even more rabbit trails to follow.

Wear, A., ed. Medicine in Society: Historical Essays. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
	
When this essay was published in 1992, the study of medieval disease and its effect on medieval people was still new.  Park makes the observation—which is borne out in primary sources such as miracle collections, health treatises and more—that people in the Middle Ages (much like today) did not go out of their way to get sick or injured.  And when they did fall ill, they would take measures—sometimes extreme—to rid themselves of the disease.  Moreover, Park, as a historian of medicine (as opposed to disease) is more interested in how “[medieval] societies responded to their experience of illness” (63) rather than identifying the actual diseases that affected people and society.  This is a useful distinction to make and one that I must bear in mind as I continue my research.  As a scholar of medieval medical pilgrimage, I recognize that I may not be as concerned with diagnosing the illnesses of the people I study so much as I am with discovering why and how they sought miraculous healing.  However, with that being said, it will still be wise on my part to make myself aware of the types of illnesses common to the Middle Ages, and determine for myself how they related to the phenomena surrounding miraculous healing.



GENERAL SURVEYS AND OVERVIEWS
Davies, J.G. “Pilgrimage and Crusading Literature.” In Journeys Toward God Pilgrimage and Crusade, 1–30. Medieval Institute Publications Western Michigan University, 1992.

	In this article, Davies proposes nine categories for pilgrimage and crusader literature:  itineraries, pilgrim diaries, letters, libri indulgentiarumi (books of indulgences), aids to devotion, guide books, travel accounts, maps, plans, and illustrations, and canons.  Within the parameters of these categories, Davies goes on to compare and contrast pilgrimage literature and crusader literature.  Comparing pilgrims and crusaders makes sense because crusaders were considered armed pilgrims, and there were similarities between the two.  For example, both pilgrims and crusaders kept diaries, but they do part ways when it comes to say, guidebooks.  Davies states that while pilgrims would have found guidebooks useful, crusaders would not have because they needed guides to show them the way in a foreign and strange land.  In sum, “guidebooks were scarcely what they needed” (19).  This article gives the reader a general idea of pilgrim and crusader literature, and the categories will be useful when I need to label my own literary research.  What’s more, Davies mentions an intriguing book, Information for Pilgrims unto the Holy Land, that I look forward to reading.

Green, Monica H. “Flowers, Poisons and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe.” In Menstruation: A Cultural History, 51–64. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

	Green’s article is a general survey of medieval medical discussions on menstruation.  While interesting, this article will probably not be used in my research.

Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
	
	Lindberg’s book is a good introduction for a scholar who is just starting research on medieval medicine and science.  The chapters discussing Roman and early medieval medicine (ch. 6) and medieval medicine and natural history (ch. 13) look like they will be the most useful.  What’s more, the book is full of useful images and maps.

Lindberg, David C., ed. Science in the Middle Ages. Chicago History of Science and Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

	The chapter on medicine (ch. 12) and possibly the chapter on science and magic (ch. 15) look like the most relevant chapters to my research.  I can say for a certainty that chapter 12 has given me the background information I need in order to approach medieval writings on medicine; first and foremost, I have learned that medieval medicine was based in philosophy rather than “observation and practical experiment” (401).

Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

	To me, this book is the epitome of surveying an entire field of research.  Siraisi writes in her introduction “My objective is to present interested readers and students of medieval, Renaissance, or medical history, or history of science with a coherent brief survey of late medieval and early Renaissance medicine as I have come to understand it” (xii).  By doing so, she also explores what this field of research can reveal about the social and cultural history of the time.  In addition, the book has several images as well as suggestions for further reading and a list of selected primary sources available in English.  This broad overview of medieval and Renaissance will be useful to me, but so will the images and additional bibliographic information.




REVIEW ARTICLES AND CRITIQUES

Murray, Alexander. “Missionaries and Magic in Dark-Age Europe.” Past & Present, no. 136 (August 1, 1992): 186–205.

	This article is a review of Valerie Flint’s The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, which as of this writing is not available at UNM’s Zimmerman Library.  Murray refers to several potentially useful sources, such as The Golden Bough and Lynn Thorndike’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science.



TECHNICAL MANUALS

Thiede, Rudiger, Tim Sutton, Horst Duster, and Marcelle Sutton. The Quantum GIS Training Manual. Locate Press, 2013.

	This book was bought sight unseen from Amazon earlier this year in the hopes of teaching myself the ins and outs of QGIS.  Unfortunately, this training manual is for QGIS 1.8, and a quick Google search shows that the most recent QGIS platform is 2.2.  Even if this manual doesn’t prove to be useful, it will still look good on my bookshelf and people will think I’m a computer whiz.

Graser, Anita. Learning QGIS 2.0. Packt Publishing, 2013.

	This was also bought from Amazon for the same reasons I listed above.  Published by the open source division of Packt Publishing, this manual is clear and concise and looks like it will be easy to use.  Even though the manual is for QGIS 2.0, I think I may have better luck with this book than the incredibly technical manual above.








TEXTUAL ANALYSIS


McCready, William D. Signs of Sanctity: Miracles in the Thought of Gregory the Great. Studies and Texts 91. Toronto, Ont., Canada: Pontifical Institute of MediaevalStudies, 1989.

	This monograph is dedicated to Gregory the Great’s works and views on miracles.  This is a significant book for my research because, as McCready points out, Gregory was the “foremost theologian between Augustine and Aquinas” (2).  For Gregory, who lived in the sixth and early seventh centuries, the modern-day saints of his day (such as Symmachus, Benedict of Nursia, and Scholastia) were just as capable of miracles as the older, more ancient saints (like James, Peter, or Paul).  And like Augustine, Gregory believed that miracles were a useful tool in converting non-believers to the Christian faith.  McCready’s work finds itself in my research because of Gregory’s influence on medieval hagiography, which is an important avenue of study for scholars of miracles and miraculous healing to follow.  Not only that, but Gregory’s Dialogues and Homilies on the Gospels provide rich fodder for the contemporary scholar who is interested in miracles.  McCready notes that the Dialogues “include miracles [of sixth-century saints] as astonishing as any of those attributed to Christ and the apostles” (2).  Furthermore, one can discern even further Gregory’s stance on miracles by “comparing [him] … to Sulpicius Severus, John Cassian, or Gregory of Tours (6).  Thanks to McCready, not only do I want to read some of Gregory the Great’s works for myself (particularly the Dialogues), but I would also like to expose myself to the writings of Sulpicius Severus, John Cassian, and Gregory of Tours.

Nothaft, Phillip. “THE MEANING OF JUDAEUS AND THE MYTH OF JEWISH MALE MENSES IN A LATE MEDIEVAL ASTRONOMICAL SCHOOL TEXT,” n.d.

	Nothaft bases his study of Christian-Jewish relations by examining the textual tradition of Computus Judaicus, “which was used as a quadrivial school text in Central and Eastern Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” (73).  While I am not interested in studying Christian-Jewish relations in depth, I think that Nothaft’s method of textual analysis will be useful for when I begin to study other manuscripts and their textual traditions for myself.


LITERARY ANALYSIS

Macdougall, Simone C. “The Surgeon and the Saints: Henri de Mondeville on Divine Healing.” Journal of Medieval History 26, no. 3 (2000): 253–67.

	Macdougall explores the relationship between miraculous healing and secular healing through the writings of Henri de Mondeville, a French surgeon in the fourteenth century.  Mondeville had great contempt for miraculous and divine healings, and touted the superiority of his own profession in his work Chirurgia (Surgery).  This article provides insight into the views and beliefs that were held by (at least one) surgeon in the Middle Ages, and how he dealt with what he saw as his competition (saints, shrines, relics, etc.).

Paxton, Frederick S. “Curing Bodies—Curing Souls: Hrabanus Maurus, Medical Education, and the Clergy in Ninth-Century Francia.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50, no. 2 (1995): 230–52. doi:10.1093/jhmas/50.2.230.

	In contrast to Macdougall, Paxton’s research focuses on a ninth century monk, Hrabanus Maurus, and his concerns as a member of the clergy.  Unlike Mondeville, Maurus is concerned with the care of the soul, and Paxton points out that whenever he uses medical language he does so metaphorically (238).  Taken with Macdougall’s article—which takes a secular healer as its focus—I can further compare and contrast the relationship between miraculous cures and secular healing.


HAGIOGRAPHY

Voragine, Jacobus de, William Granger Ryan, ed.. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Reprint edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

	Originally written in the second half of the thirteenth century, The Golden Legend is a compilation of saints’ lives and hagiographies from Saint Andrew to Saint Catherine, arranged in order of their feast days.  This primary source—complete with comments and footnotes by the editor, William Granger Ryan—will provide some of the background necessary to adequately read and interpret miracle accounts of saints.  I also anticipate finding accounts of miracles performed by the saints when they were alive, which could aid in determining how their posthumous miracles and healings were perceived.

Edward Wheatley is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago and he specializes in Medieval English and continental literature (which is the basis for Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind), paleography and manuscript studies, history of the English language, and disability studies (also a basis for the book).  He received his B.A. from Rhodes College, his M.A. from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, and a second M.A. and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.  He has given lectures and published on sin, disability, violence, and homosexuality.  In addition to writing Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind, which was published in 2010, Wheatley is also the author of Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers, published in 2000.  The seeds of interest in disability were sown while he was working on Mastering Aesop, as he explains in his preface:  “While researching my book Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers, I became interested in pedagogical texts that present animals or humans with disabilities as immoral, with the ‘incompleteness’ of their bodies often representing that of their souls.  In fable literature and beyond, this connection appears in the most common anti-Semitic trope in medieval Christianity, the ‘blindness’ of the Jews, which remained pervasive because it was reinforced by other cultural constructions of blindness.  This trope led me to a broader exploration of the history of this disability [that is, blindness].”   Furthermore, “this book examines cultural constructions of blindness in England and France in the later Middle Ages. […] Because historical texts describing how blind people lived are relatively rare, other types of representation—religious, literary, and artistic—will flesh out our understanding of history.  Indeed, the question that gave rise to this study was basically a literary one: why was French medieval literature cruel toward and satirical about blind characters while English literature was much less so?” 
	Like Irina Metzler, Wheatley makes use of modern-day disability theory but adapts it to discuss disability in premodern history.  He gives a brief background on how disability studies came to be, which is thanks to the civil rights movements for people with disabilities that began in the 1960s (interesting side note:  the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA] wasn’t passed until 1990!).  Indeed, the first chapter, “Cripping the Middle Ages, Medievalizing Disability Theory,” is dedicated to outlining the current state of disability theory and how it can be applied to the Middle Ages.  Wheatley opens this chapter with a French story from 1425, written by an anonymous bourgeois chronicler:
	Note, the last Sunday of the month of August there took place an amusement at the residence called d’Arminac in the Rue Saint Honoré, in which four blind people, all armed, each with a stick, were put in a park, and in that location there was a strong pig that they could have if they killed it.  Thus it was done, and there was a very strange battle, because they gave themselves so many great blows with those sticks that it went worse for them, because when the stronger ones believed that they hit the pig, they hit each other, and if they had really been armed, they would have killed each other.  Note, the Saturday evening before the aforementioned Sunday, the said blind people were led through Paris all armed, a large banner in front, where there was a pig portrayed, and in front of them a man playing a bass drum. 
In addition, he also provides us with a picture of the medieval “entertainment,” found in MS 264, The Romance of Alexander, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library [page 3, pass book around].  Shortly after this opening, Wheatley defines his terms.  Scholars of disability studies often make note of the difference between impairment and disability, and Wheatley follows suit.  He agrees with Metzler’s definition that impairment is the physical condition (blindness) whereas disability is a social construct (and thereby refers to the external obstacles people with impairments may face).  While some scholars have criticized these definitions, Wheatley quotes Metzler’s defense of the terms:  “It is … preferable to speak of ‘impairment’ during the medieval period rather than of ‘disability,’ which implies certain social and cultural connotations that medieval impaired persons may not have shared with modern impaired people.”   In other words, we as historians need to be careful not to apply our modern-day prejudices and judgments to situations specific to the Middle Ages.
	Wheatley goes on to discuss the two dominant models of disability used by scholars:  social and medical.  The social model “demands redefinition of able-bodied and disabled in such a way that society can acknowledge and include the full spectrum of physical types.  Disability is no longer individualized as a condition ‘belonging’ to a person but as one of a number of possible physical states in society, ‘reframing disability as a designation having primarily social and political significance.’”   On the other hand, the medical model is not so useful when it comes to studying the Middle Ages.  In modern terms, the medical model “constructs disability as a deficit or a pathology that requires correction or cure.”   Wheatley quotes at length scholar Simi Linton, whom he describes as “one of the most persuasive voices in disability theory … [and she] describes the medical model [not only] in its modern context but also in a way that will be helpful in relation to what [Wheatley] perceives as its analogue in the Middle Ages”:
	Briefly, the medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy.  Society, in agreeing to assign medical meaning to disability, colludes to keep the issue within the purview of the medical establishment, to keep it a personal matter and “treat” the condition and the person with the condition rather than “treating” the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives. 
One cannot effectively use the medical model when studying disability in the Middle Ages, but Wheatley adapts the model by pointing out that the church controlled (or at least attempted to control) “not only medicine but also many other cultural practices.”   This gives us the religious model that Wheatley uses in conjunction with the social model throughout his book.  He continues “if institutionalized religion were substituted for institutionalized medicine in Linton’s preceding analysis [see above]—if we replaced each use of the adjective medical with the adjective religious—we would have a rough picture of how the meaning of disability, including blindness, was constructed in much of Europe during the Middle Ages.  I have chosen to call this institutionalized medieval construction of disability the religious model.”   Just as modern medicine views “disability as an absence of full health that requires a cure,” medieval Christianity “often constructed disability as a spiritually pathological site of absence of the divine where ‘the works of God [could] be made manifest.’” 
	In Chapter 1 Wheatley also discusses how blind people were excluded from certain activities that could only be experienced through sight.  For example, from “the twelfth century through the remainder of the Middle Ages, the laity generally partook of the Eucharist through only their sense of sight.”   In other words, people who were blind were not able to enjoy the benefits of communion like their sighted counterparts.  Indeed, the raising of the Host became so popular that during the later Middle Ages it almost completely replaced sacramental communion, which included the consumption of the consecrated body and blood of Christ.  The contemporary literature in both England and France speak to the presence of the elevatio and its connection to blindness.  In England in the late 1460s, an anonymous Middle English chronicle was written about a locksmith who helped a Lollard steal the Eucharist.  Afterwards, the locksmith was repentant and went to church to ask for forgiveness.  As punishment, the locksmith was unable to see the Host when it was raised.  Eventually put in prison and sentenced to death, the locksmith finally confesses and he is able to see the Host again; this text therefore “equates sinfulness with the inability to see the elevation of the Host, and spiritual rectitude with restored vision.”   In France, a miracle is recorded in Jean Gobi’s Miracles de Sainte Marie-Madeleine (Miracles of St. Marie-Madeline), dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century.  A Genoese man named Jacques is imprisoned by his enemies for over seven years and becomes blind as a result of the harsh conditions.  “After his release, he goes to a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene in Genoa, where a priest celebrating the mass elevates the Host.”   Even though Jacques cannot physically see the Host, he states that he can see the body of Christ “with the eyes of his faithful spirit” and asks for a miraculous cure of his blindness.   Predictably, Jacques recovers his sight.  “The structure of this miracle strongly suggests that the elevation of the Host is experienced most intensely by the sighted.  It is also significant that Jacques prays to have his vision restored specifically in order to see the Host, not necessarily in order to take part in other activities of sighted people, indicating that visual contemplation of the Host is the best possible use of physical sight.” 
	Wheatley also introduces the notion of “catachresis” by making use of Naomi Schor’s article “Blindness as Metaphor.”  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, catachresis is defined as the “improper use of words; [the] application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor.”   According to Schor, “metaphors, by their very nature, strive toward catachresis” and Wheatley agrees with this observation.   The metaphor of blindness (found in examples that label Jews or Christian sinners as blind), according to Wheatley, is inherently catachrestic because—in the case of the Jews, for example—they were not actually blind!  They were labeled as blind for “refusing to ‘see’ the divinity of Jesus” (and we can see examples of Jews being labeled as blind in the Bible [Romans 11:25] as well as in the writings of Augustine).  Wheatley continually refers back to this useful (and unusual) term throughout his book, reminding the reader that there is really is no other way to define or use the term as a metaphor—much like when we refer to the leg of a table or the arm of a windmill—other words simply do not exist to convey the meaning.
	Wheatley also draws extensively on the idea of “narrative prosthesis,” which is a literary theory relating to disability discussed in David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis:  Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse.  In order to explain the theory, Wheatley quotes them at length, and it is worthwhile to repeat it here:
	A simple schematic of narrative structure might run thus:  first, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to the reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center of the story to come; and fourth, the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner.  This fourth step of repair of deviance may involve an obliteration of the difference through a “cure,” the rescue of the despised object from social censure, the extermination of the deviant as purification of the social body, or the revaluation of an alternative mode of being [something I highly doubt happened in the Middle Ages!]. 
One can see the structure of narrative prosthesis in plays and stories that Wheatley discusses in later chapters, such as Cortebarbe’s thirteenth-century The Three Blind Men of Compiègne and the fourteenth-century French prose romance Bérinus, which was later translated into English as The Tale of Beryn in the fifteenth century (which is a kind of fifteenth century fan fiction of the Canterbury Tales). 
	In Chapter 2, “Leading the Blind: France versus England,” Wheatley explores the differences between the two countries when it comes to experiences of the blind and the disability’s social construct.  He does this primarily by studying the “lexicon for visual impairment in each country’s language.”   The most common French words for blindness, the noun cecité (blindness) and the adjective cecus (blind), both had Latin roots (caecitas and caecus, respectively).  As far as the English language is concerned, Wheatley writes “the Middle English lexicon relating to visual impairment is impoverished if less ambiguous.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written witnesses of the noun blindness and the adjective blind, both Teutonic in origin, date from about 1000 (I double checked this).”   As the rest of the chapter demonstrates through sources such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and archives related to the founding of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts (Hospice of Fifteen Twenties, or 300) by Louis IX in 1256, “cultural practices and institutions constructed blindness differently on the two sides of the Channel…” 
	Chapter 3, “‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: The Metaphorics of Marginalization” focuses on the figural blindness of Jews and compares it to literal blindness.  It is here that Naomi Schor’s definition of catachresis makes it appearance yet again, and the chapter’s purpose is to “interrogate how the term for this disability [blindness] was used as a derogatory metaphor … in medieval Europe, blindness was both fact and figurative language, and a number of texts show that stereotypes of the blind intersected with stereotypes of Jews; the social and textual strategies of accusation and exclusion were similar for both groups.”   Wheatley makes use of biblical and patristic texts, such as the book of Romans and Augustine’s The City of God, but medieval drama “dominates [the discussion] because it most clearly demonstrates the marginalization of both the blind and Jews” and examples from the genre such as the Benediktbeuern Christmas Play and a French play of the Assumption of the Virgin from the late fourteenth century are used. 
	Chapter 4’s focus is on humor, and is titled “Humoring the Sighted: The Comic Embodiment of Blindness.”  We are reminded of the pig story which opened the book—while not written in humorous style, it’s obvious that the incident was staged to amuse the spectators.  All of these humorous examples mentioned or discussed by Wheatley are Continental, which can be explained by the fact that the blind were more “socially visible due to highly visible practices and institutions” in France and the social model of disability was more prominent there than in England, where the religious model of disability held sway.   Wheatley discusses secular texts in this chapter:  ballads, fabliaux, farces, and a romance, which are all basically French in origin.
	Chapter 5, “Blinding, Blindness, and Sexual Transgression,” shows how sexual sins were abundant in medieval texts, that they required some kind of punishment, and that “medieval writers would literalize the catachrestic meaning of blindness and use the impairment to punish sexually sinful characters.”   When it comes to blinding used as a form of punishment for sexual sin, modern-day audiences usually think of Oedipus, the king of Thebes who unknowingly marries his mother.  Later on, he discusses two tales from the CT, “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Merchant’s Tale.”  Both have a character that is blind or blinded as punishment for being sexually transgressive (the knight who falls in love with Custance in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and January, the old man married to the young woman May, in “The Merchant’s Tale”).  There is even a section on sexually transgressive women, such as Queen Guinevere in Thomas Chestre’s “Sir Launfal.”  After unsuccessfully trying to seduce Launfal, Guinevere accuses him of homosexuality and states that she would be willing to be blinded if it turns out that Launfal’s fairy lover is more beautiful than she is.  As it turns out, the fairy lover Tryamour is more beautiful (even King Arthur admits to it and doesn’t even bother consulting any of the nobles before announcing it) and she blinds Guinevere.  Whereas in Chapter 4 the sources were primarily from France because of the prevalence of the social model of disability there, this chapter’s sources mostly come from England—because of the dominant religious model of disability in that country.
	Chapter 6, “Instructive Interventions: Miraculous Chastisement and Cure,” “examines a number of instances of miraculous cure of blindness, nearly all of which exemplify and reinforce the religious idea of disability.”   The Christus medicus, or Christ as physician, trope finds its home with miracles of saints, who are the go-between earthly penitents and heaven.  Wheatley draws heavily on miraculi of saints rather than their vitae for the simple reason that the majority of the miracles are caused by their relics and therefore not found in their vitae.  He goes into some detail about saints such as St. Foy, the Virgin, and Mary Magdalene—all of whom use blinding as a form of chastisement.  And yet they also cure blindness as well.  In the last part of the chapter, Wheatley returns to “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Merchant’s Tale” to discuss the curing of the blind Briton by Custance’s companion Hermengyld (which in turn causes Hermengyld’s then-pagan husband to convert to Christianity) and the cure of the old blind man, January.
	In the final chapter, Wheatley presents three case studies of blindness concerning Jean l’Aveugle (John the Blind, aka John of Bohemia), Gilles le Muisit, and John Audelay.  John of Bohemia went blind around the late 1330s and despite several attempts to cure his blindness (at one point, after making the problem worse, John ordered a French doctor to be sewn into a sack and thrown into the Oder River; “back in Prague, he agreed to see an Arab doctor who insisted on protection from the king’s anger, regardless of the results of the consultation.  These precautions were well taken, because as a result of the treatment, John lost the use of his right eye” ), he died completely blind in 1349.  Gilles le Muisit had better luck.  From 1345-1348 he slowly began losing his eyesight due to cataracts.  Several years later an itinerant surgeon by the name of Jean of Mainz performed successful cataract surgery on Gilles:
	[The surgeon, Jean of Mainz] worked on his [Gilles’] eyes with a silver instrument similar to a needle, without removing the surface, with little anguish and quickly passed, and this cure was done, and he saw with his two eyes sufficiently for his age [about 79 years old], the year of our Lord 1351, around the feast of St. Remy; it is also the conclusion of the things that he had written (by others). 
John Audelay was an English monk who lived in the latter half of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth.  Unlike Gilles, there is no evidence of a “miraculous cure” for Audelay, and furthermore his poetry—unlike Gilles’—doesn’t focus solely on his blindness but also addresses his “deafness, sickness, and general frailty.” 
	In his conclusion, Wheatley writes that “the material presented within these covers has shown that blindness as an impairment [remember the social construction and how it’s different from disability!] was more socially marked, both positively and negatively, in France than in England [and that] blindness seems to have captured the political and artistic interests of the people of medieval England far less than it did among the French.”   
	Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind is a monograph that I, in my studies on medieval pilgrimage and religious and secular healing, will refer back to time and time again.  While this is not primarily a history book, its use of disability theory and other literary theories such as narrative prosthesis lends itself to use by historians.  

	
We officially began this seminar by reading one of the most well-known and influential books written about violence and persecution in the Middle Ages:  R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society.  Originally written in 1987 with the second edition coming out twenty years later, Formation was the first book to acknowledge and study “persecution … as a general phenomenon [and] its origins in [the Middle Ages].”   Practically every article and book that has been written on this subject since the publication of Formation has acknowledged Moore and his influence on the field of research in some way, as we have seen throughout the semester.
	Moore’s main goal is to argue against the view that the Middle Ages were barbarous (hence persecution) and that we in the post-modern world have moved past it.  Indeed, in the conclusion he states that “my assertion was that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—well into the second half of the middle ages as they are commonly defined—Europe became a persecuting society, and that it has remained one.”   While I agree with Moore that even today people are part of, victims of, and witnesses to persecution, I do not think that he made it clear in Formation that not only did society change in the Middle Ages, but that it has not really changed since.
	Moore makes use of several types of sources throughout his book.  For example, he quotes from primary sources such as Lateran canons, royal decrees, treatises, and hagiographies.  He also references secondary scholarship, such as works written by Michel Foucault, Ronald Finucane, and Robert Chazan.  To support his argument that the literati were responsible for much of the rhetoric and subsequent persecution of minorities, Moore relies heavily on sermons and exempla collections.  Moreover, Moore points out that while persecution had been studied prior to this work, the focus had been on persecution through the lens of the victims; in Formation, Moore’s focus is on persecution through the lens of the oppressors.  
	The second edition contains the original chapters 1-4 from the first edition, but Chapter 5, “A Persecuting Society,” is new.  Chapter 1, “Persecution,” is divided up into sections according to minority groups:  heretics, Jews, lepers, and the “Common Enemy,” and Moore writes in detail about the kinds of persecutions these minorities could expect to face.  In Chapter 2 he goes on to classify the different groups of minorities (including male homosexuals) according to the standards of the Middle Ages:
	In each case [of persecuting these minorities] a myth was constructed, upon whatever foundation of reality, by an act of collective imagination.  A named category was created—Manichee, Jew, leper, sodomite and so on—which could be identified as a source of social contamination, and whose members could be excluded from Christian society and, as its enemies, held liable to pursuit, denunciation and interrogation, to exclusion from the community, deprivation of civil rights and the loss of property, liberty and on occasion life itself. 

What was important to people living in the Middle Ages, according to Moore, was that groups such as heretics, Jews, and lepers were kept separate from everybody else because they had the potential to contaminate Christian society.
	In Chapter 3, “Purity and Danger,” Moore goes beyond classification and discusses the presence of and “fear of sexual pollution.”   According to Moore, this fear of sexual pollution was a way of protecting boundaries, specifically social ones.   Chapter 4, “Power and Reason,” looks at the power structures of the Middle Ages and how groups like the literati were able to use their positions of power to persecute minorities.  Here and throughout his book, he shows that stigmatized groups were stereotyped in predictable ways that often had little to do with actual traits of those groups or individuals and served more to justify and even encourage persecution.  In Chapter 5, which Moore added for the second edition, he finally outright tells his audience what his argument is:  “The main argument of The Formation of a Persecuting Society was, and is, that the persecutions of heretics, Jews, lepers, sodomites and others in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe cannot be considered or explained independently of one another, as they almost had been hitherto.”   When I read this for the first time I was puzzled and a little angry, because that was not what I thought he was arguing, based on what he said in his introduction(s) and throughout the book.  I thought his argument was simply that around the year 1000 Europe became a persecuting society.  I cannot help but get the impression that the second edition was published solely for the purpose of this fifth and final chapter, where Moore addresses those who responded to his original work, more or less telling them that they missed the point of what he was arguing.  Finally, Moore includes a sixth, unnumbered chapter, “Bibliographical Excursis: Debating a Persecuting Society.”  Here he acknowledges the growing body of scholarship centered on violence, persecution, and intolerance in the Middle Ages that has emerged since he first undertook the subject twenty years earlier.  While Moore attempts to explain away criticisms of his argument, he maintains a positive outlook by focusing on this exciting area of inquiry for which he indeed deserves credit.  Nevertheless, the fifth and sixth chapters form perhaps the most useful and interesting part of the book, since this is where Moore is able to respond to his critics (David Nirenberg in particular), and clarify some of his ideas with the advantage not only of hindsight but also of further research.  In these chapters, he highlights his innovations as well as his difficulties (which he frequently then spins as innovations).  For example, he concludes his response to Nirenberg by observing that “the phrase ‘persecuting society’ has become widely used”  as a way of framing the refinement of this idea he then pursues in chapter 5.  Later, he notes that the 
	lack of relevant comparative investigation makes it difficult to press this point about the exceptional creativity of the west in discovering victims for persecution very much further.  Nevertheless, the case of lepers brings out what is also true of both heretics and Jews, though not to an easily measurable extent, namely the degree to which the identity of the victim was socially constructed, and persecution justified, or rationlised, largely in terms of the constructed persona. 

But perhaps the most useful distinction he makes is clarifying his idea that in the “later decades of the twelfth century … the essential elements fall into place, and Europe can be seen as a persecuting society, rather than simply as a society with persecution.”   I believe Moore should have been cleared about this central point of his thesis from the start; it would have been helpful for me to see this idea articulated more explicitly throughout the book so that I could actually see the “formation” of a persecuting society.

This week’s readings deal with conversion, acculturation, and expulsion.  Most articles deal with conversion (Kedar, Johnston, Elukin, and Hames) while one addresses acculturation (Safran) and the last two discuss expulsion (Menache, Charles of Anjou).
	The main argument of “Multidirectional Conversion in the Frankish Levant” by Benjamin Z. Kedar is that conversion from Islam to Christianity as well as Christianity to Islam was “not rare at all” in the Levant during the Crusades.   Kedar supports his argument by referring to diverse sources such as chroniclers like Albert of Aachen, anonymous Latin chronicles as well as “Frankish law, canon law … oriental chronicles, treaties, a will…”  and demonstrating how common conversion was.  Indeed, the discovery of the will of an Oriental Christian named Saliba drives this point home; in his will he states that he has four slaves, two of whom have already been baptized.  He then goes on to stipulate that the other two must be baptized.   The existence of this—the only will to survive “of a burgess of the Frankish kingdom”—can lead one to surmise that there must have been more that have not survived.
	In “Ramon Llull and the Compulsory Evangelization of Jews and Muslims” by Mark D. Johnston, the focus is on a missionary from the thirteenth century.  Even though “modern scholars [such as Jeremy Cohen and Robert Chazan] regard [Ramon Llull] as a decisive contributor to the development of Christian missionizing,”  Johnston points out that he did not actually have much influence.  Perhaps it was because he was a layman and not a monk or cleric.   The article gives background information on compulsory evangelization before Llull, where the focus is on Jaume I and the Crown of Aragon.  Johnston goes over several decrees issued in the 1240s and 1260s that not only “promote the legal, social, and economic welfare of converts” but also allows for compulsory evangelizing on the part of royal officials.   The purpose of this background information is to familiarize the reader with the “complex social, economic, and political circumstances involved in mandatory proselytizing of Jews and Muslims by the early 1270s when Ramon Llull … began to write his first apologetic and controversialist works.”   Johnston makes use of several of Llull’s writings, including Libre de contemplació and Libre de demostracions, where he explains why Jews and Muslims should be forced to convert to Christianity and his opinion that the “Christian doctrine is most true, and therefore most attractive to the human mind,”  respectively.
	In our second reading by Jonathan M. Elukin this semester, he addresses the conversion of Jews to Christianity and the social, cultural, and even physical concerns that follow.  For example, through the autobiography of Herman-Judah from the thirteenth century, Elukin demonstrates that Jews were aware of what Christians thought of them (before and after converting) and that in this case, Herman-Judah felt it necessary to explain why he misunderstood the sacrament of baptism.  In short, “the entire autobiography can be seen as testimony to the need to establish a new identity in a world that is loath to accommodate such transformations [converting from Jew to Christian] and to excuse mistakes that might seem to undermine that new identity.”   Throughout the article Elukin stresses that Jews who converted to Christianity frequently faced suspicion from their Christian counterparts (even the Bible [Acts 6:1] said that baptism was not enough to erase a person’s former identity), and were not fully accepted as Christians because of the “residual Jewishness” and its potential to overcome the convert and cause him or her to go back to the Jewish religion.   Even circumcision was an issue.  As Elukin points out, “Christian suspicion of conversion often focused on the ineradicable nature of circumcision.”   In other words, circumcision was an actual physical indicator of a man’s Jewishness and simply converting to Christianity would not change that.
	Harvey J. Hames takes a literary approach in “The limits of conversion:  ritual murder and the Virgin Mary in the account of Adam of Bristol.”  Using a single manuscript from the British Library’s Harvey Collection (Fabula ineptissima de filio Willelmi Wallensis civis Bristolliae), Hames shows his readers how stories could be used to emphasize the importance of the Virgin Mary.  For Hames, it is important that Samuel the Jew and his sister were never allowed to convert (and Samuel’s wife and son died before being baptized) and that Mary mediates between this world and heaven.  He references Jeremy Cohen’s “hermeneutical Jew,” stating that the character of Samuel was “based on patterns of behaviour that he [the original author] knew would be immediately recognisable by his audience.” 
	Janina M. Safran’s “Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus” is the only article this week that clearly deals with acculturation (others, such as Elukin, more or less deal with the lack of acculturation).  Ninth century al-Andalus was a hotbed of activity with conversions from Christianity to Islam.  This led to social change and required those in power to regulate it as best they could.   Safran’s goal is to discover the Muslim perspective “on the problems of social change demonstrated by actions and deaths of the Christian martyrs and the writings of their supporters” by using Arabic legal documents.   She does this by setting the context for the social changes and then investigates how “Muslim jurists responded specifically to blasphemy.”   Through her research, Safran shows that jurists such as Ibn Habīb and Ibn Waddāh—while writing vehemently against “innovations” (that is, ideas that had the potential to corrupt Islam)—were not so quick to actually implement punishment against the corruptor or innovator.  It seems that each case was taken on its own merit and even the emir had a say in what the punishment should be and how it should be carried out.
	The last two readings focus on expulsion.  In “Faith, Myth, and Politics:  The Stereotype of the Jews and Their Expulsion from England and France,” Sophia Menache raises a valid point:  while the expulsion of Jews from England and France has been studied from economic, political, and social perspectives, “research into just how acceptable the expulsion was to contemporary society is still missing.”   The questions she seeks to answer are “to what degree did vox populi support the expulsion of the Jews both in England and in France?  Or on the contrary, were the expulsions an integral part of the king’s centralizing policy and were the reactions to it therefore a reflection of the king’s status among his subjects?”   Indeed, Charles of Anjou’s Edict of Expulsion, 1289, is an example of a king attempting to take social control—not only by expelling Jews but by also expelling “all Lombards, Cahorsins, and other foreigners who engage in public usury…” 
	While this week’s selections may not directly speak to each other (though several certainly speak to other authors we have read, such as Jeremy Cohen and Miri Rubin), they do hold up the theme of conversion, acculturation, and expulsion.  These readings have helped to make it clear that one cannot discuss one or two of these concepts without at least acknowledging the third.

This week’s topic is Muslims as Minorities in Europe.  The new monograph by Brian A. Catlos, Muslims in Medieval Latin Christendom c. 1050-1614, is a logical choice for a topic such as this.  At over 500 pages, Catlos’ work is a thorough survey of Muslims living as minorities (mudejares) under Christian rule in places such as Iberia, Southern Italy, the Levant, and Hungary.  One could argue that this monograph would have been better divided up into several books, but I think—despite its length—that it is most useful as one book.  I know, for example, that if I had to read three or four separate books by the same author on the same topic I would be less likely to read them as thoroughly and I would eventually get to a point where I could not remember what I had read where.  At least with this tome, everything is there in one place.
	Muslims in Medieval Latin Christendom is divided into two parts:  narrative and analytical.  Part one gives the reader various narratives of mudejar life.  Each chapter is dedicated to a specific time and place, such as Italy and North Africa c. 1050-c. 1350.  The second part takes a thematic approach to its analysis, taking into account the “ideological structures, administrative institutions, and quotidian relationships that gave shape to subject Muslim society and the mudejar experience under Christian rule.”   In the preface Catlos points out everything this book is not.  For example, it is not a book on the Crusades, or “ethnic and religious oppression.”   Rather, this is a book about subject Muslim communities and how they persisted under Christian rule, along with “the effect this had on them and on the societies in which they lived.”   With these two distinct parts, the reader gets the best of both worlds:  stories about Muslim life under Christian domination, taken directly from primary sources, and thematic analysis of the sources.
	Catlos uses a plethora of primary and secondary sources.  Primary sources range from legal documents, chronicles, memoirs, treatises, and more.  Catlos quotes scholars such as John Boswell, Sarah Davis-Secord, R.I. Moore, and David Nirenberg.  In addition, he quotes his own work extensively as well as authors and articles that we have already for this semester (such as Elisheva Baumgarten and Carmen Caballero-Navas), demonstrating again that the authors and works we have read and discussed this semester are also in conversation with each other.
	Catlos is certainly engaging in a conversation with certain scholars that he specifically points out.  For example, in the introduction to Part 2, Catlos uses Moore’s term of a “persecuting society,” immediately bringing the latter scholar to the reader’s mind.  He does not seem to agree with Moore’s thesis that around the year 1000 Europe became and continued to be a persecuting society.   Rather, Catlos argues that contemporary scholars are mistaking “a symptom for a cause” and that an explanation such as Moore’s is not a “necessary nor a sufficient cause for the oppression or marginalization of Muslims.”   Catlos later emphasizes his belief that violence (and understanding!) were indicators of “convivencia and conflict” rather than causes. 
	This statement brings to mind the discussions we have had towards the end of each seminar, asking what kind of society people lived in during the Middle Ages.  Was it convivencia?  Was it functional violence?  Or was it simply a persecuting society?  We never seem to come up with a satisfactory answer, and that is OK—that is why historians still have jobs—to argue one point over another and convince their audience that they are right.  I am of the mind that it was probably a mixture of all three—and possibly even more paradigms that we have yet to define.  
Catlos makes an interesting argument for the paradigm of conveniencia, or the “Principle of Convenience.”   He writes 
The glue that held Muslim and Christian society together was interest—the self-interest of Christians and Muslims, and the mutual interest generated by an interdependence that emerged as a consequence of the broad range of economic and political relationships that they engaged in, whether by circumstance, by choice, or by force, and that benefited either the constituent members and collectives of one group or both. 

It is convenient to look out for one’s own self-interest, and this is exactly what the Muslims did.  I do not think it is too far-fetched to apply our understanding of “convenience” to the medieval Muslims living under Christian rule, even though we are trained as historians to try and not judge the past by today’s standards.  We do things today because they are convenient, like continue to live in one place over another because moving is not worth the trouble.  Catlos’ monograph is chock full of examples like this and others, such as Muslims and Christians doing business together.
	In his review of Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom c. 1050-1614, R.T. Ingoglia of Caldwell University states that “this book will quickly become (and long remain) a vade mecum [a handbook or guide] for students interested in the topic of [medieval Muslims living under Christian rule]” and that it is “essential [for] upper-division undergraduates and above.”   Depending on the trajectory of my thesis, I will not be surprised if I end up quoting Catlos myself in addition to making use of the sources listed in the bibliography.

This week’s readings focus on the poor, the leprous, and the disabled.  Each of the selections addresses these minorities in turn.
	In his selections from Images of the Medieval Peasant, Paul Freedman discusses the “different images of the peasant in the Middle Ages.”  He continues “these images formed an extensive vocabulary of contempt, but at the same time they portrayed the peasant as closer to God than those who oppressed him.”   Freedman is not only interested in the images themselves but also the connections among them along with the “vocabulary and language and grammar used in reference to peasants.”   In exploring common themes such as labor and productivity, Freedman takes a thematic—as opposed to chronological—approach and studies literature, language, and images through those lenses.  Eventually, Freedman defines his terms, which in this case, is the meaning of the word “peasant.”  After acknowledging what we today would consider and recognize as the definition of “peasant,” he tells his audience what it meant to be a medieval peasant:  “the medieval peasant was a tenant farmer who, at least in theory, could sustain himself and his family while paying a substantial rent (labor service, produce, and/or money) that supported his lord.  […]  Some peasants were free, while others were serfs…”   He also points out that the peasantry and the poor—while both were marginalized—were distinctly separate because the peasants were not seen as “economically marginal but rather as productive” whereas the poor depended on others for their livelihood.  
	In “The Leper in Medieval Islamic Society,” Michael Dols aims to “evaluate the social implications of [leprosy] and consequently … describe the status of the leper in medieval Islamic communities.”   He does so by looking at “nonmedical data about leprosy in the premodern period, primarily from Arabic sources” such as hadith literature as well as medical texts that specifically reference leprosy.   He even makes use of osteological studies where “distinctive bone changes” point to leprosy in Egypt as far back as 500 CE.   Dols concludes his article with a comparison of how lepers were treated in Islamic society versus those in Europe.  For example, Muslim society did not require the separation of lepers and the Qur’an had no equivalent of the Levitical law that informed Christian Europe. 
	In “Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies,” Irina Metzler takes a historiographical approach in examining the study of disability in the Middle Ages.  She points out that until recently, the disabled were completely ignored by medieval scholars (indeed, Metzler is at the forefront of this discipline, to be sure).  In addition, she argues that using a variety of sources is key to understanding disability in the Middle Ages.  For example, social, economic and legal sources, along with cultural history, religious studies, archaeology, art history, and literary studies can help inform our view of disability in the Middle Ages.  Moreover, “the sociological and cultural insights gained from the disciplines of Disability Studies and ethnology have provided recent emerging scholarship with a theoretical framework from which to approach the study of impairment in the pre-modern past, which supersedes the medical model of disability favoured by older historiography.”   Metzler concludes her article by listing in detail various areas of research that are still more or less ignored by scholars.  Subjects and disciplines such as medieval hospitals, disabilities that come with old age, how the law dealt with disability, comparing portrayals of disability in the works of Chaucer and Langland, iconography, and material culture are just some of the topics suggested by Metzler.
	In “Poverty and Disability: A Medieval Jewish Perspective,” Ephraim Shoham-Steiner addresses the interchangeability of poverty and disability by making use of the work of Michel Mollat (despite the fact that Mollat used Christian sources in his study).  Shoham-Steiner takes Mollat’s approach and applies it to “medieval Jewish writings … especially Rabbinic sources” in order to analyze poverty and disability in the medieval Jewish community.   Shoham-Steiner also reminds his audience that while “many poor people sufferance from disability … not all disabled people were poor.”   For example, he notes that in the Jewish sources where disabled people are discussed, they are usually “influential members of the community or even religious functionaries that continue to hold leading religious position[s] although they are physically disabled.”   While in today’s world we are used to people with disabilities exercising agency by holding positions within society, this is not something that we usually think of when it comes to the Middle Ages.
	In her article “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary,” Susan Zimmerman looks at lepers, Jews, and women (and even pigs) through the lens of contaminated blood.  Each group had associations with contaminated blood and were therefore pushed to the margins of society.  Lepers physically represented putrefaction and death with their open sores oozing blood and puss; male Jews were rumored to menstruate; and women menstruated as well.  The horror and repulsion of these instances of contaminated blood was rooted in the idea that what is on the inside of the body should not come out of it.

This week begins two classes of reading and discussion on Jews in the Middle Ages.  To begin with, we are discussing the intellectual foundations of persecution of Jews while next week we will discuss the actual stories of hatred.  Jeremy Cohen’s Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity fits the bill when it comes to talking about the intellectual foundation of the persecution of Jews.  As he states in his afterword, the purpose of the book is to study “several key stages in the medieval career of Christianity’s theologically and hermeneutically crafted Jew.”   Both theology and hermeneutics lend themselves wonderfully to intellectual thought and discussion, with theology the concern of patristic writers and theologians while hermeneutics (that is, the theory or act of interpretation) falls within the purview of those concerned with theology.  As we discussed in class, medieval Christianity needs a hermeneutical Jew because Christian theology is based on and supersedes the Old Testament (in the form of the New Testament).  In other words, if Christianity is the true religion, why are there still Jews?  This is the basic question that theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas struggled to answer.
	The book is divided into four parts.  Part 1 analyzes Augustine’s “acclaimed doctrine of Jewish witness;” Part 2 is devoted to theologians from the early Middle Ages (Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and Agobard of Lyons) and how each of them—in “markedly different ways”—“construed the role of the Jew in a properly ordered Christendom”; Part 3 addresses “changes in perceptions of the Jews during the twelfth century” by studying the works of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Alfonsi, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Peter the Venerable.   Finally, Part 4 takes us to the thirteenth century with the “ambivalent” writings of Thomas Aquinas while also coming back full circle to the “lasting legacy of Augustine.” 
	Since this monograph is an intellectual history, there are no references to popular, economic, political, or even Jewish sources.  Cohen’s study is based solely on theological sources such as the writings of Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. 
	Saint Augustine and his writings on Jews serve as the basis for the entire book, which he based in turn on the writings of Paul and the Bible, where “the books of the New Testament—above all the Gospels and Acts, several of the Pauline epistles, and Hebrews—abound with representations of Jews and Judaism, many of them hostile.”   Each of the authors that Cohen discusses in turn is in conversation with Augustine.  As far as Augustine was concerned, the Jews were meant to be tolerated because they “bear[ed] living witness to the biblical roots and verities of Christianity.”   This included not killing the Jews (they needed to serve their purpose as living examples of Christian theology from the Old Testament) and allowing them to practice their faith.
	In the early Middle Ages, this Augustinian legacy was known and remarked upon by well-known figures such as Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and Agobard of Lyons.  Pope Gregory the Great—remembered as a great writer and thinker in his own right—addressed the issue of Jews in both his correspondence and commentary, which Cohen uses as the basis of his study.   In his letters, Gregory “intervened on at least six occasions to prevent violence against Jews, their synagogues, and their religious practices,” and also urged his bishops to convert Jews to Christianity.   Because Gregory believed that the apocalypse was imminent, he viewed the conversion of the Jews as an urgent and immediate problem.
	Unlike Gregory, Isidore of Seville and Agobard of Lyons both wrote anti-Jewish polemics that were influenced by Augustine.  While Augustine and Gregory both claimed that the Jews’ error in crucifying Jesus lay in their ignorance, Isidore stated that the Jews were knowingly malicious toward Jesus.   However, he also advocated for the conversion of Jews to Christianity because it “would soon bring Christian history to its long-sought fulfillment” as well as the “baptism and Christian upbringing of Jewish children.”   Archbishop of Lyons during the reign of Louis the Pious, Agobard of Lyons riled vehemently against the royal policy of Jewish favoritism.   Among other things, he took it upon himself (and directly disobeyed the emperor by doing so) to baptize pagan slaves of Jews.   Cohen also suggests that Agobard had a personal vendetta against the Jews, for their “noxious behavior and impudence” in (among other things) selling non-kosher meat to Christians, refusing to eat at a Christian’s table, and for sexually exploiting Christian women in their employ.   Like Isidore, Agobard was also in favor of forced baptisms and conversions of Jews, whereas Gregory was totally opposed to it.
	The response to Jews and Judaism in the twelfth century changes from one of preservation to one of acquisition.  The reasoning behind this was that Augustine’s doctrine of witness no longer applied to the Jews living in the twelfth century (after all, they weren’t the same Jews who crucified Jesus or lived during Augustine’s time) so there was no need to preserve them.  This in turn led to Christians stripping Jews of their possessions and assets; they were detested as money lenders, and labeled as heretics and marginalized.  
	Cohen’s argument of the hermeneutical Jew and how it changed throughout the Middle Ages is a convincing one.  Rooting his study in the works of Augustine and tracing ideas of the Jew in medieval Christianity all the way through to Thomas Aquinas, Cohen demonstrates how each of the theologians are in conversation with each other and how their writings influenced later scholars.

Most of this week’s articles, with the exception of the one by D. Fairchild-Ruggles, speak to each other in that they all discuss at some level the relationships between Christians and/or Jews and Muslims.  Many of the articles focus on the relationship between women across the different religious groups, while others—such as Brundage and Nirenberg—discuss men as well.  
	The article by James A. Brundage, “Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in Medieval Canon Law,” dates from 1988 and is therefore the oldest of the selection.  Brundage points out that canonical Jewry law was “well established” long before his period of research (the twelfth to fourteenth centuries), and he acknowledges that the laws in the “Patristic period and early Middle Ages” have already been well-studied.   But because there is not as much scholarship on canonical Jewry law in the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, Brundage examines the law through the lens of “sexual relations between Christians and Jews, primarily within marriage, but also outside of it.”   By using Christian canonical writings such as those by Gratian and Johannes Teutonicus, Brundage explores limits on social relationships (Christians and Jews should not eat together) and ritual purity (Christians having sex with Jews contaminates the supremacy of the Christian religion).  Upon reading later articles, Brundage’s influence on scholars such as Elisheva Baumgarten and David Nirenberg is apparent.   
David Nirenberg’s 2002 article “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation:  Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain” is a natural offshoot of his book Communities of Violence (1996), specifically chapter five where he discusses sex between Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  Nirenberg argues that sex in the Middle Ages is a worthwhile topic for historians to study because it offers another lens through which we can view the “religious classification” of Christians, Jews, and Muslims living in Iberia.   He also incorporates his research on violence by using the riots and massacres of 1391 as a reference point for what he describes as “punctuated equilibrium:  long periods of constant but functional conflict separated by episodes of widespread violence.”   Relying heavily on royal letters from the time period and the preachings of St. Vincent, Nirenberg demonstrates the anxieties and worries that were apparent when society was faced with sex across religious boundaries, how to deal with converts to Christianity, and how best to preserve “Christian identity and Christian privilege.”   According to Nirenberg, the study of sex—just like politics or the church—is a viable methodology when studying religious relationships.
In “The care of women’s health and beauty:  an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women,” Carmen Caballero-Navas aims to unveil the “extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care.”   In other words, her goal in this essay is to determine just how common these customs, practices, and the knowledge of them were among women of different religious groups.  Caballero-Navas relies mainly on “elusive sources” such as “medical literature on women’s health care” and compares them to other textual sources such as treaties and encyclopedias as well as visual sources.   The author is also heavily influenced by the scholarship of Monica Green and Montserrat Cabré, who have both done research on anonymous female authorship in the Middle Ages.   
María Jesús Fuente looks at the roles women in each religion played in medieval Iberia in 2009’s “Christian, Muslim and Jewish Women in Late Medieval Iberia.”   She focuses on Muslim and Jewish women in particular and “how [they] contributed to society; and whether, in particular, Jewish and Muslim women encouraged separatism or cultural integration.”   In short, she argues that her findings from “Inquisition documents [and] … literary texts, marriage contracts, documents of sale, religious rules, sermons, royal laws, fueros or local legislation and legal proceedings” from the “royal or local courts during the fourteenth, fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón”  have led her to the conclusion that while Jewish and Muslim women were passive (that is, they did not exercise power outside the home), they used it to their advantage in order to ensure that their homes (the only safe haven for a minority culture)  were isolated from ritual contamination in the form of interactions with women from other religious groups.  One could argue that Fuente is looking at the other side of the same coin which Caballero-Navas researches for her article; both are studying the interactions between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish women, but Fuente is taking it a step further by also looking at how Jewish and Muslim women blocked the cultural exchange from entering their homes.
Finally, Elisheva Baumgarten’s article, “‘A separate people’?  Some directions for comparative research on medieval women,” can be viewed as a culmination of all the articles that preceded it.  Using medieval Jewish sources, she proposes “different strategies for studying minority and majority women” in the Middle Ages.   In addition, she calls attention to areas of scholarship that are deserving of further attention, such as not only comparing minority (Jewish and Muslim) and majority (Christian) women, but also looking into how their daily lives intermingled.   While she readily acknowledges the difficulties inherent in studying medieval women (there are few sources by them for us to study!), she also stresses the importance of such scholarship because it will enable us to “come closer to the goal of changing the study of women from that a separate people to part of society in particular and medieval society at large.” 
The primary source reading for this week, “Confessions of a Muslim Prostitute,” highlights the worries and anxieties that medieval Christian society was concerned with when it came to prostitution outside its religion.  The interrogators are interested in where the Muslim prostitute known as Mariem comes from, why she left her husband, how she became a prostitute, and if she had had sex with any Muslim men while in Valencia.  Interestingly, the source does not show us whether or not she was asked about sleeping with Christian men.  In addition, the account ends with Mariem being allowed to go free—we are not told what becomes of her.

Merchants, Commodities, Travel, and Power
	The last two thirds of our seminar this semester fell under the headings “Merchants” and “Commodities.”  Our readings have taken us from Russia to Asia to Amsterdam to Italy and finally to the Americas.  Each of the scholars we have encountered looks at one or both of these topics through a specific lens.  For example, Francesca Trivellato sees her monograph, The Familiarity of Strangers, primarily as a “social and economic history of Livorno Sephardim [in the early modern period],” a specific group of Jewish Italians,  as does Bernard Bailyn.   Other works, such as the collection of essays in Early Modern Things edited by Paula Findlen, use interdisciplinary approaches like art history, economics, social history, and empirical science to explore and study objects from the early modern era such as birds, still-life paintings, and scientific experiments.   In addition, each of these texts address travel via trade in one way or another.   I am interested in discussing the phenomenon of travel through trade in the early modern period by looking not only at the texts we have read and discussed this semester, but also primary sources.  In doing so, I have become interested in power, another theme of our semester, and, in particular, the power relations made visible through trade.
	Travel and power are useful lenses through which to study merchants and commodities, since it is through the act of traveling that merchants and commodities in the early modern era made their way throughout the world.  Through travel and trade merchants would be introduced to new societies and cultures and their respective goods, while at the same time offering the products of their native lands.   In writing about trade between “Latin Europe and the Ottoman Empire,” Trivellato gives a laundry list of goods that were exchanged back and forth:
	…Europeans longed for woolen yarn…vegetable dyestuffs…wax, leather, animal skins, ostrich feathers, medicinal products…grains from Tunis and the Aegean islands…and other foodstuffs (olive oil, Egyptian rice, Arabica coffee, dried fruits, honey, cheese, tobacco from Salonica, and legumes).  Sudanese silver and gold were transported across the desert to Tunis, where they were loaded on ships bound for Livorno.  Indian cotton textiles…and spices (pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cumin) reached Levantine ports from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf along caravan routes. 

All of these items came from the East, which gave their respective countries power.  As Trivellato points out, there were few European commodities that were “accepted in return for Asian goods,” with coral being in particularly “high demand.”   “Jacques de Coutre (1577-1640),” Trivellato writes, “a soldier of Flemish origin…noted the variety of coral (in round shapes and branches, processed and raw) arriving in Goa on board Portuguese ships.  In smaller quantities, coral was also used to purchase slaves in West Africa.  [And] in 1728 the Venetian consul in Livorno mentioned that some coral was shipped as far north as the fair of Archangel, on the White Sea.”   Coral even made it to India and the Himalayas, where it had a “symbolic value that stimulated a burgeoning trade” and was used in jewelry.   Coral provided Livorno power in that in the mid-seventeenth century the town “emerged as the world’s center of coral trading and manufacturing.”   In addition, guild documents prove that Livorno was on the raise and Genoa felt threatened by its rise.   Trivellato continues:
	The concentration of all steps in the chain of production (from the financing of fishing to the exporting of the polished product) in one locality helped a cluster of small firms, which the Sephardim came to dominate, to benefit from economies of scale.  Through spontaneous coordination and competition and, to a lesser extent, through the support of the state, Livorno became a leading center of economic activity concerning coral.  The concentration of raw material, labor, expertise, and marketing lowered transaction costs for all investors.  This sector thus developed into an exampled of so-called industrial districts, rather than developing along the lines of vertical integration and large-scale enterprise. 

Livorno’s capability in building an infrastructure that would support the coral trade cemented its prominent position.  Referred to as “the coral fair of Livorno,” the seasonal market from October-November witnessed significant amounts of trade.   Coral was so valuable that “in 1759 it was calculated that every year fishermen from Torre del Greco, Santa Margherita (Liguria), and Ajaccio (Corsica) brought coral from Sardinia and Corsica to Livorno that, once polished, was worth at least two hundred thousand pieces of eight.”   Trivellato’s postulation that “coral was the most important industry in eighteenth-century Livorno”  is supported by documentary evidence that shows even in the middle of a depression, the “coral workshops employed 1,340 [people] and processed forty thousand kilograms of raw coral.”   Coral was key to Livorno’s power and success.
	Coral was not the only commodity that was desirable.  Cochineal, an “extraordinary red dyestuff” found “in the great marketplaces of Mexico in 1519,”  was highly valued and prized in Asia up until the early twentieth century, when synthetic dyes were still eschewed by the majority of the population who preferred traditional methods to newer ones.   Cochineal also enjoyed great popularity throughout Europe, including but not limited to Spain, England, and the Netherlands.  Cochineal itself made its debut in Europe (via Spain) in 1523, under the reign of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.   Eventually many dyers throughout Europe were replacing their Old World dyes of St. John’s blood and Armenian red with cochineal.  It was superior to the others in a few key ways:  
	Cochineal insects produced their carminic acid with far fewer lipids than did the plump little Armenian insects, whose fat melted in the dyepot and sometimes coated the threads of silk, preventing the fibers from fully absorbing the dye.  Second, cochineal could be more efficiently produced than either St. John’s blood or the Armenian dyestuff, and it could be harvested several times a year.  Third—and most important—cochineal yielded far more powerful dye than any of the Old World reds.  Though roughly similar in cost, ounce for ounce it was ten times more potent than oak-kermes and St. John’s blood.  It produced up to thirty times as much dye per ounce as Armenian red—a fact which must surely have caused dyers to marvel.  Cochineal, in other words, was the closest thing Europe had ever seen to a perfect red. 

In short, cochineal changed the dyeing industry in the sixteenth century.  Like so many other commodities, cochineal also had a political impact.  Greenfield recounts how Frenchmen appealed to their fellow compatriots by “arguing that it was a wasteful foreign luxury that depleted the country’s store of bullion.”   Indeed, it seemed that the main problem Europe had with cochineal “was that Spain controlled the supply.”   And it was this—controlling the supply—which gave Spain power.  The crown, under Charles V, frequently tried to create a monopoly over the cochineal trade, therefore giving it power not just in Spain but over any countries they traded with.  Greenfield writes, “From the 1560s to the early 1600s, Crown officials in Spain repeatedly came up with schemes for setting up a royal monopoly on cochineal—the only American agricultural product they ever deemed worthy of such treatment.”   It wasn’t until 1618 when “the Crown finally establish[ed] a partial monopoly on the dyestuff:
	Under the new law, the merchants of New Spain were required to auction off their cochineal to the king’s agents.  The profitable transatlantic arm of the trade thus became the province of the Crown, which apparently hoped to net about 100,000 pesos a year from the arrangement. 

The Crown’s power, however, was thwarted by clever merchants and traders who “hid their cochineal, lied to Crown officials about the way the grading system worked, and generally drove auction prices sky high.”   The new law was eventually repealed and the Crown realized that without the cooperation of merchants, in Greenfield’s estimation, establishing a monopoly was futile.
	Another way that the Spanish Crown attempted to keep its control over the cochineal trade was to treat the production process as a state secret.  During the reign of Philip II, any foreigners in New Spain “who showed too strong an interest in cochineal [were] carefully watched and, if necessary, deported.”   Despite having to repeal the law which gave the king’s agents first pick of cochineal from merchants, Spain’s legislation “as far as the live insect was concerned” was effective.   Greenfield is worth quoting at length here:
	…Crown officials realized how high the stakes were, and were correspondingly zealous in their prosecution of the relevant statutes.  But no doubt it helped that in this battle the Crown had the full cooperation of Spanish merchants on both sides of the Atlantic.  Indeed, no Spaniard wished Spain to lose its monopoly, for the country’s possession of the superb dyestuff had become a point of patriotic pride.
	Even so, it is somewhat surprising that Spain managed to keep such a firm grip on an animal as small as cochineal.  There was, however, another factor working in Spain’s favor:  cochineal’s inability to tolerate all but the most optimum environments.  Vulnerable to heat, cold, rain, and other sudden changes, Dactylopius was not a natural traveler.  Moreover, techniques for collection botanical and zoological specimens were still quite primitive (and would remain so until the nineteenth century).  Most collectors simply sent back pressed plants and stuffed animals or did the best they could to keep living collections alive in trunks and packing cases—a makeshift approach that was ineffective with creatures as delicate as cochineal.  Anyone who tried to cram live cochineal into a chest and smuggle it out of the country was likely to find the insects dead before he reached the border. 

It was not only legislation, but also the insect itself which helped Spain maintain their monopoly over the highly desirable dyestuff.
	As King of Spain, Charles V was not merely interested in products from the New World and how he could make money off of them and retain power.  Richard Ehrenberg demonstrates in Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance:  A Study of the Fuggers and Their Connections, that Charles V gaining the title Holy Roman Emperor was far from a fait accompli.  Ehrenberg makes a convincing argument that even royalty depended on rich merchants who had the ability to acquire and loan out large sums of money.  It was common for large merchant houses to have agents in cities, representing them and taking care of business.  Take the Fugger, for example.  They had agents throughout Europe who would travel back and forth between the Fuggers’ home base in Germany and their respective posts.  One such agent was Wolff Haller, the Fuggers’ agent in Antwerp.  Because Charles V was also Lord of the Netherlands, he dealt with Hall directly.  Charles needed monetary aid in securing his election to the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and it was a race against his opponent, Francis I of France.  Prior to the election, Charles and the Fugger had had dealings with one another, and sources state that Charles was very pleased with Haller.  Upon taking control of Spain in 1517 he “declared…[that] he had received most important services from Haller and also at the time of the election as King of the Romans.”   Indeed, Haller appeared to be instrumental in Charles’s election as Holy Roman Emperor.  This is significant because of the travels he undertook as part of his responsibilities:
	As Haller, we know, made a journey in 1519 from Antwerp to Spain to carry out some large monetary transaction between the King and the Fugger in connection with the election, it is probable that he had acted for the Fugger in these dealings, a fact which would explain the great affection with which Charles continued to remember him in later years—in 1526 he speaks of him as “Our Counsellor [sic] from Our youth up.” 

But the Fugger weren’t the only powerful and influential merchants to assist Charles.  The king started conducting business with the most important Genoese merchants and the second largest only to the Fugger, “the South German house of Anton Welser and Company, who sent to Spain two special representatives for this purpose, Heinrich Ehlinger and Sebastian Schopel.”   Eventually Charles was elected Holy Roman Emperor, but not without further difficulty.  After all was said and done, the Crown of the Holy Roman Emperor cost a total of “850,000 florins, of which the Fugger lent 543,000 florins, the Welser 143,000 florins, the Genoese and Florentines together 165,000 florins.”   As it turned out, Charles was apparently in no rush to repay his creditors.  Jakob Fugger, the head of the family business, wrote to Charles in a letter that “will be noteworthy for all time as evidence of the tone in which a merchant—the foremost of his time, of course—dared to adopt towards the most powerful monarch of his day:” 
	Your Imperial Majesty doubtless knows how I and my kinsmen have ever hitherto been disposed to serve the House of Austria in all loyalty to the furtherance of its well-being and prosperity; wherefore, in order to be pleasing to Your Majesty’s Grandsire, the late Emperor Maximilian, and to gain for Your Majesty the Roman Crown, we have held ourselves bounden to engage ourselves towards divers princes who placed their Trust and Reliance upon myself and perchance to No Man besides.  We have, moreover, advanced to Your Majesty’s Agents for the same end a Great Sum of Money, of which we ourselves have had to raise a large part from our Friends.  It is well known that Your Imperial Majesty could not have gained the Roman Crown save with mine aid, and I can prove the same by the writings of Your Majesty’s Agents given by their own hands.  In this matter I have not studied mind own Profit.  For had I left the House of Austria and had been minded to further France, I had obtained much money and property, such as was then offered to me.  How grave a Disadvantage had in this case accrued to Your Majesty and the House of Austria, Your Majesty’s Royal  Mind well knoweth. 

Despite this strongly worded letter, the Fugger continued to do business with the House of Austria and retained their status as the largest and most important merchants in Europe.  The Fugger were able to retain their position and power through strategically placed merchants throughout Europe, taking carefully calculated risks, and their ability to more or less “wine and dine” with the secular powers of their day.
	In following the thread of travel and power, Erika Monahan, in her manuscript The Merchants of Siberia:  Trade in Early Modern Eurasia, points out the early modern period was a time when “the fruits of long distance trade were no longer confined to elite courts and the relatively few merchants and factors who supplied such needs and wants…products of long distance exchange came to touch more germanely the lives of people everywhere.  Sugar from the Caribbean, calico and cottons from India, medicinal rhubarb and tea from China, woolens from England, or fur pelts from the Great Lakes or Siberia became objects known to those not counted among the elites.”   Several of this semester’s texts support this statement.  For example, in the popular history Cod, Mark Kurlansky traces the trajectory these fish have witnessed over the years:  from being an exclusive product of the Basques to (according to Kurlansky) being the reason for the American Revolution.  In demonstrating the popularity of the code, Kurlansky writes,
	In 1597…[a] fifty-ship fleet returned from the Grand Banks, sailing up the south Cornish coast to Plymouth.  It was a sight unknown in our age—some 200 canvas sails crowding the sky as the fleet made its way into the sheltered harbor against the green patchwork hills of Devon.  […]  Merchants from Holland, France, and Ireland packed into the small port town, waiting for the Plymouth fleet so they could buy their fish and ship it out again to Europe’s markets. 

Cod was a commodity which lent itself nicely to salting.  “Not only did cod last longer than other salted fish,” writes Kurlansky, “but it tasted better too.  Once dried or salted—or both—and then properly restored through soaking, this fish presents a flaky flesh that to many tastes, even in the modern age of refrigeration, is far superior to the bland white meat of fresh cod.  For the poor who could rarely afford fresh fish, it was cheap, high-quality nutrition.”   
	Cod also gave New England power in relation to the foreign countries it traded with.  The fish had “lifted New England from a distant colony of starving settles to an international commercial power.”   As part of their wealth, cod merchants in New England displayed their power in several ways:
	The members of the “codfish aristocracy,” those who traced their family fortunes to the seventeenth-century cod fisheries, had openly worshiped the fish as a symbol of their wealth.  A codfish appeared on official crests from the seal of he Plymouth Land Company and the 1776 New Hampshire State seal to the emblem of the eighteenth-century Salem Gazette—a shield held by town Indians with a codfish overhead.  Many of the first American coins issued from 1776 to 1778 had codfish on them, and a 1755 two-penny tax stamp for the Massachusetts Bay Colony bore a codfish and the words staple of Massachusetts.
	When the original codfish aristocrats expressed their wealth [and power] by building mansions, they decorated them with codfish.  In 1743, shipowner [sic] Colonel Benjamin Pickman included in the Salem mansion he was building a staircase decorated with a gilded wooden cod on the side of each tread. 

Kurlansky jokes that these actions “prove that New Englanders are capable of great silliness.”   But more importantly, they demonstrate that cod was so vital to New England’s economy that it even became a status symbol, denoting wealth and power. 
	However, long before the settlers of New England were enjoying wealth and power thanks to cod, it was the Basques from northern Spain and southwestern France that initially benefited from cod.  Kurlansky argues that
	Catholicism gave the Basques their great opportunity.  The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating “cold” foods was permitted.  Because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food.  The Basques were already selling whale meat to Catholics on “lean days,” which, since Friday was the day of Christ’s crucifixion, included all Friday, the forty days of Lent, and various other days of note on the religious calendar.  In total, meat was forbidden for almost half the days of the year, and those lean days eventually became sat cold days.  Cod became almost a religious icon—a mythological crusader for Christian observance. 

In addition to becoming a religious icon that was a staple of many Christians’ menus, for a long time cod provided Basques with a monopoly on a huge portion of the fish trade, giving them power over other countries who dealt in seemingly inferior fish.
The seminal collection of essays found in Early Modern Things:  Objects and Their Histories, 1500-1800, edited by Paula Findlen, also deals with commodities such as ginseng, rhubarb, and porcelain that eventually found their way into everyday society.  These commodities and the act of travel which was undertaken to get them from one place to another, “has spawned a considerable amount of research that combines the economic historians’ attention to trade, investment, and profit with a curatorial attention to objects.”   As McCants points out in her essay on porcelain
	…the objects themselves that were associated with tea and coffee consumption:  the cups, saucers, and pots…were imported from Asia for what was at first indeed the highest stratum of the social and economic elite.  However, through the twin mechanisms of imitative production techniques (most importantly available in the form of local Delftware) and increasingly the importation of ever more numerous and cheaper porcelain goods from Asia, the use of ceramic vessels for the preparation and consumption of the new hot beverages spread to the broad middle strata of Dutch society and even among the citizen working poor. 

All evidence supports McCants’s thesis that coffee and tea—commodities that had been reserved strictly for the upper classes—eventually became popular among the lower classes.  And not only that, but the dishes which were used to store and serve the drinks followed suit as well.  In her conclusion, McCants argues that “tea and coffee wares…enjoyed a wider distribution than even simple books or the Bible.”   Indeed, she proves that tea and coffee were great equalizers among social classes, pointing out that “As the household asset ranking by evidence of material possessions indicates, the consumption of colonial beverages [such as tea and coffee] really did extend well down into the lower reaches of society.”   Because of this, those in the upper echelons of society had to find other ways to display their wealth and power, such as buying and displaying intricate and expensive items like “timepieces, jewelry made from precious metals, and scientific instruments.”   The upper classes were bound and determined to separate themselves from the lower classes, and superfluous items such as those listed above aided in that endeavor.
	Like coffee and tea, Erika Monahan argues that the consumption of rhubarb in the early modern period “exploded,” following the opposite pattern of consumption found in the Middle Ages where it was “initially concentrated in elite niches.”   She continues,
	Rhubarb appears as one of the top fifteen commodities in an inventory from an apothecary in early sixteenth-century Italy.  Venetian merchants continued to seek rhubarb in the markets of Aleppo, while in Russia commercial agents from England, Sweden, The Netherlands, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire kept their nose to the ground for inside information on the rhubarb trade.  Rhubarb sailed from St. Petersburg to northern European ports while Greek merchants bought rhubarb in Moscow to resell in Constantinople.  Meanwhile, the Dutch East India Company…and British East India Company competed with the Russian state’s overland trade for rhubarb market share. 

Here again we see an example of people (and things) traveling in order to acquire goods and sell them in areas where they are not readily available.  In his Natural History, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) speaks at length about rhubarb as a purgative:
	Rhubarb hath manifestly in it parts of contrary operations:  parts that purge; and parts that bind the body:  and the first lie looser, and the latter lie deeper:  so that if you infuse rhubarb for an hour, and crush it well, it will purge better, and bind the body less after the purging, than if it had stood twenty-four hours; this is tried:  but I conceived likewise, that by repeating the infusion of rhubarb, several times, as was said of violets, letting each stay in but a small time; you may make it as strong a purging medicine as scammony.   And it is not a small thing won in physic, if you can make rhubarb, and other medicines that are benedict [mildly laxative], as strong purgers as those that are not without some malignity. 

Even Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) has something to say about rhubarb.  In his essay On Moderation, he writes “A nature that would accept rhubarb as something familiar would spoil its usefulness; it must be something that hurts the stomach in order to cure it; and here the common rule fails, that things are cured by their opposites, for here the evil cures the evil.”   In other words, one must make use of something vile or evil (rhubarb) to cure a condition such as a sour stomach.  It is highly unlikely that Montaigne would have ever considered rhubarb pie for dessert.  Bacon’s and Montaigne’s writings on rhubarb as a purgative confirms Monahan’s argument that consumption of the vegetable “exploded” and its medicinal qualities were recognized throughout Europe and Asia.
	In the same collection of essays, Carla Nappi studies Chinese ginseng and how—through trade—the definition of ginseng actually changed.  Nappi shows that there was a “particular way of being in motion, and a new way that the particular forms of motion constituted new modes of objecthood, in China’s early modernity.  The early modern object was constituted…by practices of identification characterized by new modes of location, observation, and translation.”   Nappi then goes on to show how through literature and lexicography ginseng came to have many synonyms which were “textually equated to each other” with ginseng being the composite object they each refer to.   That is, in “contemporary terms the descriptor [“ginseng”] is used to name any number of plant species, and in early modernity terms in Chinese, Jurchen, Mongolian, and Manchu texts were also used to describe several different kinds [of ginseng].”   Changes in identifying ginseng and its uses came about with each ruling dynasty.  For example, the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) did not have access to ginseng so they stipulated that the root was to be a form of tribute “expected from Korea.”   However, the succeeding dynasty—the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912)—“didn’t consider the root a local Korean product…[because they could] access ginseng [themselves] in the Northeast frontier,” unlike their predecessors.   In addition, access to ginseng also proved vital to the Qing Dynasty’s acquisition of power. 
	In The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, Bernard Bailyn looks at various aspects of trade—the fur trade, trade with the Old World, the fisheries, and others—and how they affected the economy of New England as a whole.  For example, “a large part of the fish consumed by New Englanders before 1640…was obtained not from local fishermen but from the west-country and foreign fishing vessels that occasionally came into New England waters…[but] by the end of the decade the reputation of the local fishing grounds was reviving to the point of attracting new ventures by Bristol fishing merchants.”   Even John Smith was interested in where good fishing could be found.  Kurlansky writes that in 1616 Smith “published his map [of good harbors] and a description on New England in the hope of interesting prospective settlers.” And as for the fur trade, its goods were not infinite and it was “quickly exploited and exhausted…[and] by 1675 it was entirely gone.”   Because the fur trade lasted only a short time (in relation to other markets), those who derived power from it were not able to enjoy it for long.
	Bushkovitch also discusses the fur trade in terms of relations between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.  Even though there was trade in sables in which the Ottomans purchased from the Russians, “the trade between Russia and the Ottoman Empire is extremely difficult to determine.”   He continues,
	The problem of Russian merchants going to these countries [in the Ottoman Empire] is very complicated:  There are numerous references, but mostly in connection with diplomatic missions, and it is difficult to determine if Russian merchants regularly traveled to these places.  In general, it may be said that until about 1530…evidence showed that Russians (mostly Muscovites) regularly went to Kaffa, and some even go as far as Tokat in Asia Minor.  Trips to Istanbul were apparently not as common.  After 1530 the picture becomes quite vague…about this time the overland route through Moldavia and Poland seems to have become the main route by which Russian and Ottoman goods were exchanged. 

This apparent lack of information speaks to what Bushkovitch addresses in his preface—there is simply not enough evidence to support the “conviction that [foreign trade] was somehow ‘primary’ in Russian commerce” and that when dealing with the topic of foreign trade the  historian “must provide his own background.”  That is, the historian must look at sources outside of Russia to find information he is looking for.  In terms of power, Bushkovitch argues for “a two-sided relationship between the [Russian] merchants and the [Russian] state.”   Within this proposed system, both parties would benefit—the state by “enforc[ing] and [defend]ing the collection of taxes,” and merchants by “farming certain taxes.”   Through this arrangement, the state could ensure that the merchants were cooperative and subservient, and the merchants were able to count on a certain amount of revenue from the state.  However, despite Bushkovitch’s hypothesis that the relationship was more two-sided than favoring one side over the other, it is hard to come to the definitive conclusion that the merchants had more power than the state.  In this particular situation it would appear that the state had the upper hand.
	In Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750, Stephen Frederic Dale relies exclusively on secondary literature and previously published sources:  
	…more than eleven hundred pages of published Russian documents that illumine the business activities of a little-known settlement of Indian merchants in the Russian Caspian part of Astrakhan…provide a uniquely detailed insight into the commercial and financial activities of Indian merchants, not merely in Astrakhan itself, but in Iran as well…offer the only means that I know to discuss specific Indian business practices in the diaspora in the early modern era… 

When Dale’s work was first published in 1994, he did not have access to the town of Astrakhan itself or its district and city archives, leading him to rely on the sources listed above as well as other secondary sources.   Here we can see the use of power by the Russian government exercising control over who has access to what when it comes to archives and other documentary evidence.
	Another author who relies almost exclusively on secondary sources and literature is Patricia Risso.  In Merchants and Faith, Risso is interested in the travel, so to speak, of religion.  While she briefly mentions commodities such as gold, ivory, and slaves,  her primary focus is the “intersection of Islamic and Indian Ocean histories…[and] to illustrate relationships among ideology, culture, and economics.”   She explores this through the lens of travel.  For example, she notes that “[Muslim] jurists elaborated laws that would affect maritime commerce.  In addition to the strictly religious sources for jurisprudence, there were pre-Islamic and extra-Islamic customary laws that provided standards in areas such as convoy, salvage, and fishing.”   Even the Islamic religion had its roots in travel, with “extant biographical materials on Muhammad…[stating that] his occupation was established as caravan manager, rendering trade a model livelihood.   Further hallmarks of travel within Islam include the Hijra—the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD.  This year would later come to be considered the first in the Islamic calendar.  Risso further argues that “Middle Eastern and Indian Muslims had contacts with China which provide remarkable evidence of the Muslim role in the maritime history of Asia.  Muslims practiced in the China trade not as the result of conquest but due to the demand for their services as carriers.”   In other words, the Islamic religion did not travel to India by way of war and conquest, but rather through trade.  In turn, the “…Muslims…were merchants of faith”  because through trade their religion spread out among the known world.
	In discussing Europeans and trade in relation to Asia, Risso points out compared to their counterparts in the east, merchants in the west experienced an apparent lack of power.  In a business where money is essentially the bottom line, Europeans had several disadvantages.  Their overhead expenses were higher because they used larger ships that required bigger crews; they were unwilling to engage in a specific type of exchange known as dastgardan (“transferring from hand to hand”) which consisted of installment purchases rather than “the immediate transfer of commodities;” and finally the goods they could offer were not as desirable to people in the east whereas Europeans themselves “had a constant demand for Asian pepper, spices, silk, and tea.” 
	In the early modern period, travel and trade went hand in hand with power.  Those who had the power could trade and travel.  Additionally, people and businesses who did not exercise power would be willing to travel to acquire goods.  This paper has shown examples where countries exercised power over their merchants and over other countries; merchants exercising power over other merchants; and we have even witnessed merchants who held power over secular rulers (something that seems to be echoed in America today, with politicians in the pockets of big business).  We have also seen examples where power was displayed and exercised among the social classes.  This essay has demonstrated that with trade came travel, and that power was not far behind.
	
Political Economy in the Early Modern Period

	This class started out with a seemingly simple question:  “What is political economy?”  I had never heard the term before, never having taken an economics course at the college level.  Needless to say, my first stop was Google, where website upon website was just waiting for me to visit.  And it almost goes without saying that the Wikipedia entry for “political economy” was right at the top.  I will admit that Wikipedia helped me in getting the general idea of political economy, but it did not really answer the question asked by Dr. Monahan, which, in turn, had become my question, too.  My next stop was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  According to the OED, political economy is defined as “the branch of economics dealing with the economic problems of government,” with the first English use appearing in 1687.   I do not think I would be alone if I said that that definition gives more questions than it does answers.  With that being the case, it is necessary for me to formulate my own definition, based on the works we have read for class and what I have learned from them.  I would argue that political economy takes two areas of society—politics and the economy—and fuses them together.  Politics and the economy are closely linked and in many cases one will affect the other.  This is certainly the case for Karl Marx, whose theoretical society made up of the petite bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and capitalists is highly politicized.  And in several class readings we have come across situations where politics and economy are inextricably linked, such as in the case of world trade conducted by large national companies which were backed up by their governments. 
	“Political economy” seems to be a term reserved for the early modern period.  Indeed, most of the instances cited by the OED come from that time period.  By that token, most of the articles and books we have read as part of this class engage with the idea of “political economy” simply by discussing events and trends in the early modern period.
	To further complicate matters, as a class we were immediately introduced to an article by Jack Goldstone where he takes the term “early modern” to task.  In “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World,” Goldstone—a sociologist who studies “revolutions and social movements, comparative economic development, comparative politics, conflict and rebellion, democracy, fragile states, and political demography” —discusses the problems of such a term and how it relates to commerce.  Goldstone’s article speaks to historians in that he deals quite heavily with the troubles and dangers of putting a label on a time period:
	…I would now argue that we (for I include the title of one of my own books) have fallen into a terrible error when we use the term “early modern.”  In a word, the “early modern” world wasn’t.  That is, it was not in any way “modern,” and certainly not an “early” form of modernity.  Somewhat as the Holy Roman Empire, in a famous aphorism, was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire, so I would now say a rigorous review of evidence would show that the “early modern” world was neither “early,” nor “modern,” although it was arguably, in its trade relations, a single “world.” 

Goldstone’s issue with the term “early modern” lays in the fact that the time period was not early or modern because it lacked certain characteristics that help define the “modern” age.  And even by arguing what the early modern period was not, Goldstone still engages with political economy.  Referencing the previous quote, Goldstone is arguing that early societies lacked the features necessary to be deemed modern, but what about early modern societies?  According to Goldstone, an early modern society is defined by a presence of “…markets, merchant capital, and proto-industrial (e.g. household market-oriented) production.   Conversely, modernity is only realized (at least sociologically) when 
	…religion is a lifestyle choice, not an inescapable and uniform discipline, and in which belief in science has largely supplanted belief in active spirits and miracles.  It is one in which most consumer goods are produced by mass-production facilities powered and lit by fossil fuels and/or electricity, rather than by craft production in households powered and lit by muscle, water, wood, dunk or tallow, and in which transportation is powered by engines—on land or water—rather than by wind or animal power.  It is one in which government is designed by men to meet their perceived needs, rather than accepted as sanctified by immemorial tradition. 

Although Goldstone’s definition of a modern society seems straightforward and most scholars would agree that these attributes can be found in modern societies, there is so much more that can be said about “modern” society and the concept of “modernity.”  As Goldstone points out, a person’s definition of “modernity” can be dependent upon which “theory of social change” they subscribe to.   For example, a person who subscribes to Marx’s theory will view the concept of modernity differently than one who subscribes to Weber’s theory.  While Marx would argue that capitalism is everything and everything relates to capitalism (in other words, Marxism), Weber, on the other hand, argues that it is Protestantism (specifically Calvinism) which is at the root of capitalism and political economy (in other words, the Protestant Ethic).  Even though both Marx and Weber were not living in or writing about the early modern period, they were nevertheless influenced and inspired by philosophers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.
	As I said before, the early modern period cannot be studied without engaging in the concept of political economy.  Several scholars and philosophers such as Adam Smith and Mark A. Peterson also discuss political economy.  For Smith, political economy was simply what we refer to today as economics.   With this in mind, Smith’s “Of the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour,” in The Wealth of Nations, is all about political economy:  labor is an integral part of political economy in that it is required for the manufacture of goods.  It is also necessary for trade as well as to accumulated wealth and money.  Without labor none of these things would be possible.  Smith writes in the first paragraph of his essay that
	There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed:  There is another which has no such effect.  The former, as it produces a value [or commodity], may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour.  Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit.  The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. 

While both of these groups are involved in labor and manufacture, it is only the group that “produces a value” which is productive.  That is, workers such as servants, public officials, “churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera dancers, &c”  are unproductive because their la or does not produce anything tangible.  On the other hand, merchants and those who “employ a multitude of manufacturers”  are productive because they create commodities.
	Mark A. Peterson writes in “A World in a Shilling,” an article about the political economy of Boston in the seventeenth century, “I intend to focus on the political economy of the city-state of Boston itself, to assume that Boston was for Boston, an independent entity pursuing its own interests within the larger context of the Atlantic world.”   Peterson borrows his definition of political economy from Adam Smith, saying that “the two chief purposes of political economy are ‘to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and…to supply the state or common-wealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.’”   According to Peterson, the political economy of seventeenth-century Boston was strong and vibrant enough to support not only overseas trading but also local production (such as in the forms of John Hull’s lumber mill and horse farm).  The economy of Boston continued to thrive, even at the expense of people indigenous to the continent.
	Economists such as Jan de Vries also engage with political economy by virtue of their research.  Of the articles by de Vries which we have read for this class, I would like to focus on two, each of which discuss political economy.  In “Connecting Europe and Asia:  A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape Route Trade, 1497-1795,” de Vries’s goal is to “understand the chief factors that gave shape to a unique episode in world history, the era in which trade between Europe and Asia was dominated by European trading companies.”   These European companies—the Carriera da India of the Portuguese Crown, the English East India Company, the Dutch Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, and the Danish East Company, no name a few—were all backed by their respective governments.  Rather than focusing on the relationships between the companies, de Vries sets out to explore their relationships with Asia via the Cape route.  He does this by using narrative, statistics, graphs, and charts.  De Vries points out that Asia was a huge force in its own right, and Europe simply was not able to keep up with Asia’s demand for precious metals.  Because of this, “a converging global marker was not yet a practical possibility.”  Rather, “a polycentric world market persisted with dynamic centers in both Europe and Asia.”   This observation is in line with Goldstone’s, who readily admits that the early modern world “was … in its trade relations, a single ‘world.’”   Opposite in scope from his article, de Vries’s “The Origins of the Industrious Revolution,” focuses on the home-market economy and changes in consumption.  Both the home-market economy and changes in consumption are related to political economy in that in order for more capital to be produced, there must be money spent to increase the amount of capital a manufacturer has, as well as in the form of consumption.  According to de Vries, the changing patterns in consumption were brought about by “natural passions [human motivations], urban life and trade, and the social power of women.”   In turn, these changing patterns in the Industrious Revolution were the central force which led to the Industrial Revolution.
	In a similar mode of thought, Joyce Appleby addresses consumption in her article “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought.”  She begins by asking pertinent questions.  Questions such as “Why is it that consumption has rarely been examined thoroughly or dispassionately despite its centrality to economic life?” and “Why is consumption uniformly construed negatively even though there is abounding evidence that consuming is pleasurable and popular and brings rare moments of satisfaction?”   Throughout her article Appleby traces the trajectory which consumption followed.  For example, “ordinary people” were able to pursue “the pleasures of consumption” along with their “social superiors” because the real threat of famine had disappeared, a population boom was underway, and the demand for goods increased.   According to Appleby, consumption in the early modern period was new and novel; a “force that had to be reckoned with” which to “first … be named before it could be discussed.”   In turn, consumption eventually became a sin and a character flaw, thanks to the moralists of the time who would preach and write about the evils of consumption.  But this did not stop consumption en masse.  In conclusion, Appleby points out a glaring omission in the works of famous scholars:  “The economic development and social transformation which characterized the modern era depended upon changes in attitudes, habits, and levels of consumption, and yet our social theorists from Smith through Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Weber and Arthur Lafer have concentrated upon production [my emphasis].”   For Appleby, the study of consumption is just as important as the study of production and political economy.  The notions of consumption, production, and political economy form a cycle:  in political economy there is production, which creates a commodity.  In turn, people acquire the commodity through consumption.  More consumption begets more production, which allows for the continued presence of political economy.
	Like Joyce Appleby and Jan de Vries before her, Martha C. Howell explores commerce and political economy in early modern Europe.  In Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600, Howell concentrates on the general population of people who participated in commerce, either by production or consumption.  She argues that the early modern era was not (as some scholars contend) was not simply a transitional period which eventually gave way to capitalism and the modern economy.  “If we want to understand that original [time period],” she writes, “we need to study it without the lens of the future.”   In other words, the early modern period should be studied for and on its merits, not just as a “way station between the medieval and modern.”   For Howell, the early modern era was a time when people did not pursue “material self-interests,” and therefore would not recognize that aspect of the modern economy—the notion that individuals who pursued their own self-interests did the most good for the public wellbeing.    Just as Jan de Vries demonstrates in his article on the Industrious Revolution that it was changed in attitude and consumption that helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution, so Howell shows that changes in attitudes toward marriage (in the form of conjugality), property, and dress (to name a few), cleared a path for the  modern economy.  For example, she equates dress to a person’s identity.  The loss of one’s identity through dress posed a problem for the elites because “commerce not only gave new people access to luxuries that had once been the sole preserve of the nobility; it also radically increased the supply of such goods, dress above all.”  With the advent of commerce, people no longer had to dress according to their social status or profession.
	Hopefully these selections from class have demonstrated the inherent relationship between the early modern era and political economy.  There is no doubt that the early modern era was a time of great change and that the modern economy followed it.  But I would argue, like so many of the scholars we have read, that the early modern era had its own unique kind of commerce which was growing throughout Europe from the household outwards.  This was, for Jan de Vries, the period of the Industrious Revolution.  For Joyce Appleby it was a time of heightened consumption.  For Karl Marx it was just the transitory period leading up to capitalism.  For Jack A. Goldstone, the early modern era witnessed a world market through trade, but it was not in any way shape or form an early type of modern or even modern at all.  For Smith, who was writing at the end of the eighteenth century, the early modern period was a time bustling with political economy.  And the scholars who followed him—de Vries, Appleby, Marx, and Goldstone—each engage with political economy at varying levels in their writings.  Political economy is the common thread between all of them.