MEDIEVAL MONEY AT WORK

Jacobi investigates how and why certain financial activities that might not seem to be work were coded as such during the late medieval period. She suggests that medieval money was made to work in order to align practices of wealth accumulation with deeply entrenched moral ideas about how money should be made licitly. Investigating the history of how risk came to constitute part of what made generating profit from money permissible encourages them to reflect critically on their own attitudes towards the work of money, a point to which she shall return. Properly historicized, the problem of how work is coded in material and immaterial ways has quite a deep grasp indeed, as docs the tradition of exchange rates that are ever beneficial to lenders as well as debates concerning the ethicality of such practices.