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- Title
Unresolved debates on usury and greed in late Renaissance France: Guillaume Bouchet and others.
- Authors
Patterson, Jonathan
- Abstract
This article studies competing and incompatible views on usury (moneylending at interest) in France, on the threshold of modernity. The figure of the fraudulent, greedy usurer was frequently condemned across many kinds of writing in sixteenth-century France. Nevertheless, the relationship between greed and usurious practices was much more complex than many writers would admit. Modern scholars have identified three prevailing attitudes to usury in Renaissance France: outright condemnation, reluctant tolerance and a more neutral appraisal of calculating interest on loans. Going beyond previous scholarship, this article shows how these attitudes could unusually coexist in the same text. A case study of Guillaume Bouchet's Les Serées (1584-98) - an important example of sixteenth-century merchant literature - reveals a new, unresolved way of writing about usury and greed in late Renaissance France. Bouchet tackles the problematic subject of usury neither from a normative perspective (as did lawyers and theologians) nor from a purely pragmatic standpoint (as did the writers of merchant arithmetic manuals). Instead, Bouchet integrates elements of both normative and pragmatic discourse on usury within a wider critique of riches and their abuse during the turbulent Wars of Religion and concomitant inflationary crisis that afflicted France in the late sixteenth century.
- Subjects
FRANCE; USURY; RENAISSANCE; AVARICE; LES Serees (Book); BOUCHET, Guillaume; MERCHANTS; JEWS; SIXTEENTH century; HISTORY; COMMERCE
- Publication
Renaissance Studies, 2014, Vol 28, Issue 5, p659
- ISSN
0269-1213
- Publication type
Case Study
- DOI
10.1111/rest.12040