Money, History, and Moral Economies: Communicative Functions of Monetary Information in the Institutional Historiography of the Later Middle Ages (1250–1530)

• Applicant: Dr. Marcus Meer
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548264129

This project investigates mentions of monetary amounts and wider discussions of money in the chronicles produced by cities and monasteries (both female and male monasteries) as well as courts of princes and kings within the European lowlands from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. A "close reading" of such monetary information examines to what extent this information was not only the result of personal or professional interests of chroniclers or an expression of a spreading monetary consciousness. It seems that this monetary rhetoric was employed in the service of specific institutional strategies of remembering the past. Drawing on approaches of scholarship on discursive institutionalism, this project inquires into the communicative potential of this monetary information for concrete contemporary challenges and decisions about future actions. Firstly, in the face of acute crises, monetary information possibly supported the creation of collective identites, insofar as economic "highs" and "lows" were remembered as part of a shared institutional history. Secondly, monetary rhetoric in medieval historiography may also have been used for individual as well as collective strategies of legitimisation that rejected, claimed, or assigned responsibility for political decisions and economic conditions, thereby attempting to grant or deny legitimacy to leaders or groups. Thirdly, monetary information articulated normative ambitions regarding the economic practices of institutions. They guided future decision-makers, for example, to avoid failed "experiments" and instead to follow "success stories", but also not to neglect moral considerations. In this regard, this project proposes an expansion of the constitutive communication media of a "moral economy" of the premodern era in the form of historiography: medieval chroniclers communicated a rather nuanced understanding of the relationship between morality and practices of money and economy, which clearly contradicts any dichotomous understanding of a medieval periodn averse to money and economy on as opposed to a monetarily and economically enlightened modernity. This nuanced view is supported by the comparative approach to the historiographical tradition of different institutions, genders, and regions, which remains sensitive to institutionally varying manifestations of a developing monetary consciousness and religious/moral considerations as well as situational legitimising and apologetic requirements.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants