Thursday, July 30, 2009

Medieval market design

The International Congress on Medieval Studies has issued a call for papers (posted by Dan Ernst on the Legal History Blog):
"We welcome proposals for papers that explicitly link legal history with economic history in explaining the dynamics of medieval life and culture.
Here are some examples of possible topics:

"The canon law generated regulations concerning Usury, the Just price etc. during the "long" Twelfth Century. Meanwhile, secular laws sought to regulate markets (through laws on forestalling, regrating, engrossing, Assize of Bread and Ale etc.) and boosted those on coining offenses. This sustained attempt to restrain economic activity through law must be largely explicable from the context of economic change against which it was made. How might the Legal Revolution (the whole or any part) and the rising "Profit Economy" (Lester Little) be causally linked?"

My one attempt to study Medieval market design, in a paper on unravelling (with Xiaolin Xing), concerned forestalling (forestalling was the medieval crime of transacting before the official opening of a market). Our discussion can be found here. (The selection is short, and on rereading it I recall that I particularly enjoyed footnote 72, partly because of the name of one of the plaintiffs in the case it describes).

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