The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Early Modern History: Society and Culture)

"This book is an excellent work of scholarship. It seeks to redefine the early modern English economy by rejecting the concept of capitalism, and instead explores the cultural meaning of credit, resulting from the way in which it was economically structured. It is a major argument of the book that money was used only in a limited number of exchanges, and that credit in terms of household reputation, was a 'cultural currency' of trust used to transact most business. As the market expanded in the late-sixteenth century such trust became harder to maintain, leading to an explosion of debt litigation, which in turn resulted in social relations being partially redefined in terms of contractual equality." -- Publisher's website Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction: Deconstructing Capitalism....Pages 1-11 Front Matter....Pages 13-13 The Sixteenth-Century Growth of the Market....Pages 15-36 The Structure and Practice of Marketing Activity,and its Expansion....Pages 37-59 Transactions on the Market....Pages 60-94 The Structure of Credit Networks....Pages 95-119 Front Matter....Pages 121-121 The Sociability of Credit and Commerce....Pages 123-147 The Cultural Currency of Credit and the Construction of Reputation....Pages 148-172 Unpaid Debts and Doubts about Trust....Pages 173-195 Front Matter....Pages 197-197 Disputes and Levels of Litigation....Pages 199-271 Litigation and the Social Order: Debt and Downward Mobility....Pages 272-312 Front Matter....Pages 313-313 The Contractual Society....Pages 315-333 Back Matter....Pages 335-453 "In 1598 a man - branded the Calabrian Charlatan by his opponents - appeared in Venice claiming to be King Sebastian, the Portuguese monarch who disappeared in battle some twenty years before. Over the next five years, the Venetians, the Spanish and the Portuguese wrangled over the true character and identity of the man. Was he a lunatic? Was he an impostor? Was he a messianic king? Eric Olsen uses this strange event to explore Portuguese millenarianism and how a group of Portuguese rebels sought to exploit it to free their nation from Spanish rule. Along the way, he analyzes broader issues in early modern European politics such as the fragility of the state, the function of exemplary justice, the influence of popular beliefs, and the role of rumor."--BOOK JACKET "The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional Church. Luther's doctrine of salvation 'by faith alone' led to the death of Purgatory in the Protestant tradition and forced Reformers to re-establish the funeral on a new theological basis. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead that shaped the daily encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism, concluding with a discussion of the spread of honourable nocturnal burial at the end of the seventeenth century."--Jacket