In The Medieval Economy of Salvation, Adam J. Davis shows how the burgeoning commercial economy of western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, alongside an emerging culture of Christian charity, led to the establishment of hundreds of hospitals and leper houses. Focusing on the county of Champagne, he looks at the ways in which charitable organizations and individuals—townspeople, merchants, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics—saw in these new institutions a means of infusing charitable giving and service with new social significance and heightened expectations of spiritual rewards. In tracing the rise of the medieval hospital during a period of intense urbanization and the transition from a gift economy to a commercial one, Davis makes clear how embedded this charitable institution was in the wider social, cultural, religious, and economic fabric of medieval life.

In The Medieval Economy of Salvation, Adam J. Davis shows how the burgeoning commercial economy of western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, alongside an emerging culture of Christian charity, led to the establishment of hundreds of hospitals and leper houses. Focusing on the county of Champagne, he looks at the ways in which charitable organizations and individuals--townspeople, merchants, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics--saw in these new institutions a means of infusing charitable giving and service with new social significance and heightened expectations of spiritual rewards. Hospitals served as visible symbols of piety and, as a result, were popular objects of benefaction. They also presented lay women and men with new penitential opportunities to personally perform the works of mercy, which many embraced as a way to earn salvation. At the same time, these establishments served a variety of functions beyond caring for the sick and the poor; as benefactors donated lands and money to them, hospitals became increasingly central to local economies, supplying loans, distributing food, and acting as landlords. In tracing the rise of the medieval hospital during a period of intense urbanization and the transition from a gift economy to a commercial one, Davis makes clear how embedded this charitable institution was in the wider social, cultural, religious, and economic fabric of medieval life.

This book provides a systematic commentary on the first two books of the Bible: Genesis and Exodus. Drawing on these two essential books, it subsequently offers new readings of several issues relevant for today’s economic and social life. Western Humanism has its own founding cultural and symbolic codes. One of them is the Bible, which has for millennia provided a wealth of expressions on politics and love, death and economy, hope and doom. Biblical stories have been revived and reinterpreted by hundreds of generations, and have informed many of our most beautiful works of art, not to mention the dreams of children and adults alike. And they have given us hope during the many painful times of exile and oppression that we have gone through, and are going through still. Among the books of the Bible, in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, Genesis and Exodus represent the true foundation of biblical theology and anthropology, but in them we also find the roots of the culture of markets, money and commerce, which would go on to flourish during the Middle Ages and ultimately form the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (Max Weber) or the ‘religion of capitalism’ (Walter Benjamin) in the modern era. This book examines the Biblical foundations of our conception of social relations, and offers new insights on the present economic and social discourse.

"In this stimulating and important book Lester Little advances the original thesis that, paradoxically, it was the leading practitioners of voluntary poverty, Franciscan and Dominican friars, who finally formulated a Christian ethic which justified the activities of merchants, moneylenders, and other urban professionals, and created a Christian spirituality suitable for townsmen. Little has synthesized a vast body of specialized literature in Italian, German, French, and English to write an interpretive essay which provides a new perspective on the interaction between economic and social forces and the religious movements advocating the apostolic ideal of voluntary poverty...Little's book is a major contribution, not only to the history of the religious movement of voluntary poverty, but also to the interdisciplinary study of the middle ages." --Journal of Social History

Without meaning to be irreverent, it is fair to say that in the Middle Ages, at the height of its political and economic power, the Roman Catholic Church functioned in part as a powerful and sophisticated corporation. The Church dealt in a "product" many consumers felt they had to have: the salvation of their immortal souls. The Pope served as its CEO, the College of Cardinals as its board of directors, bishoprics and monasteries as its franchises. And while the Church certainly had moral and social goals, this early antecedent to AT&T and General Motors had economic motives and methods as well, seeking to maximize profits by eliminating competitors and extending its markets. In Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm, five highly respected economists advance the controversial argument that the story of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages is in large part a story of supply and demand. Without denying the centrality--or sincerity--of religious motives, the authors employ the tools of modern economics to analyze how the Church's objectives went well beyond the realm of the spiritual. They explore the myriad sources of the Church's wealth, including tithes and land rents, donations and bequests, judicial services and monastic agricultural production. And they present an in-depth look at the ways in which Church principles on marriage, usury, and crusade were revised as necessary to meet--and in many ways to create--the needs of a vast body of consumers. Along the way, the book raises and answers many intriguing questions. The authors explore the reasons behind the great crusades against the Moslems, probing beyond motives of pure idealism to highlight the Church's concern with revenues from tourism and the sale of relics threatened by Moslem encroachment in the holy lands. They examine the Church's involvement in the marriage market, revealing how the clergy filled their coffers by extracting fees for blessing or dissolving marital unions, for hearing marital disputes, and even for granting permission for blood relatives to wed. And they shed light on the concept of purgatory, showing how this "product innovation" developed by the Church in the twelfth century--a form of "deferred payment"--opened the floodgates for a fresh market in post-mortem atonement through payments on behalf of the deceased. Finally, the authors show how the cumulative costs that the faithful were asked to bear eventually priced the Roman Catholic church out of the market, paving the way for Protestant reformers like Martin Luther. A ground-breaking look at the growth and decline of the medieval Church, Sacred Trust demonstrates how economic reasoning can be used to cast light on the behavior of any complex historical institution. It offers rare insight into one of the great historical powers of Western civilization, in a analysis that will intrigue anyone interested in life in the Middle Ages, in church history, or in the influence of economic motives on historical events.

Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of socioeconomic spaces produced and perpetuated by Chinese monasteries, Michael J. Walsh reveals the "sacred economies" that shaped early Buddhism and its relationship with consumption and salvation. Centering his study on Tiantong, a Buddhist monastery that has thrived for close to seventeen centuries in southeast China, Walsh follows three main topics: the spaces monks produced, within and around which a community could pursue a meaningful existence; the social and economic avenues through which monasteries provided diverse sacred resources and secured the primacy of Buddhist teachings within an agrarian culture; and the nature of "transactive" participation within monastic spaces, which later became a fundamental component of a broader Chinese religiosity. Unpacking these sacred economies and repositioning them within the history of religion in China, Walsh encourages a different approach to the study of Chinese religion, emphasizing the critical link between religious exchange and the production of material culture.

The Reformation was a seismic event in European history, & one which changed the medieval world. Much which followed in European history can be traced back to this event. In this book Peter Marshall seeks to explain the causes & consequences of religious & cultural division & difference in western Christianity.