Economy And Nature In The Fourteenth Century

Intellectual developments pioneered by scholastic natural philosophers of the fourteenth century constituted a critical stage in the emergence of scientific thought. Beneath these technical developments lay a profound reconceptualization of nature. The purpose of this book is to analyze the components of this reconceptualization, and to speculate on the influences that shaped it. It argues that the transformation of the conceptual model of the natural world c. 1260-1380 was strongly influenced by the rapid monetization of European society during the same period. Contents - Introduction; 1. The economic background: monetisation and monetary consciousness in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; 2. The Aristotelian model of money and economic exchange; 3. The earliest Latin commentaries on the Aristotelian model of economic exchange: Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; 4. Models of economic equality and equalisation in the thirteenth century; 5. Evolving models of money and market exchange in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; 6. Linking the scholastic model of money as measure to proto-scientific innovations in fourteenth-century natural philosophy; 7. Linking scholastic models of monetised exchange to innovations in fourteenth-century mathematics and natural philosophy.