Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality extends far beyond its title, offering multifaceted considerations into medieval social classes from kings to beggars and incorporating varied textual sources from theological texts to stories of courtly love to merchant ledgers. The exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum, curated by Diane Wolfthal, with Deirdre Jackson as the in-house curator, together with its accompanying catalog, investigates the “economic revolution” (6) that occurred from around 1200 to 1600.

The exhibition catalog, published in association with D Giles Limited, bridges disciplines, including contributions by an economic historian, Steven A. Epstein, and a scholar of numismatics, David Yoon. Jackson provides the catalog’s introduction, while Wolfthal dives into the multifaceted themes of the exhibition in chapters three through seven, which closely correlate with the subsections of the exhibition itself. The catalog is richly illustrated and incorporates some of the Morgan’s most significant illuminated manuscripts, while also featuring printed materials on paper, panel paintings, architectural sculpture, stained glass, coins, mercantile objects (such as a seventeenth-century boxed balance with weights from Cologne), and decorative objects (including a fifteenth-century ring-framed purse with a clasp ornamented with microarchitectural Gothic turrets). This array of media offers the reader a fuller conception of medieval visual representations reflecting pervasive beliefs and anxieties related to wealth, money, and trade.

The exhibition at the Morgan effectively interspersed these various media throughout each of the show’s subsections, which thematically corresponded with the chapters of the catalog, allowing works from different chronological and geographic origins to come into dialogue. The catalog will remain a valuable compendium addressing the complex relationship between money and ethics in a period that ultimately led to the development of capitalism.

Jackson commences the catalog by way of a global consideration on the “Origins and Uses of Money” from prehistoric times to contemporary society. Offering an overview of different currencies from cattle and cowrie shells to the earliest banknotes in China, Jackson encourages the reader to adopt a broader understanding of money and its societal implications.  She introduces an important theme of the exhibition, the societal function of money, discussing how it was indicative of “complex interactions between individuals” (14). Acknowledging the influence of ancient Greek and Roman coins on medieval European coinage, Jackson presents another thread woven throughout the exhibition: the “bond between temporal and spiritual realms” (17).

Turning to the specific period of study, Epstein offers an informative outline of varying environmental factors impacting economic development from climate events to the plague in the first chapter, “The European Economy, 1200–1500.” Epstein brings to the fore a critical topic present in many of the subsequent chapters of the catalog: the constructed antisemitic association between Jews and moneylending or usury. Utilizing economic data to demonstrate Jews’ “overall economic and social insignificance” in medieval Europe (32), Epstein clearly underlines these associations as a method for Christians to displace their own anxieties surrounding usury and avarice onto a minority already subjected to extreme bigotry and intolerance.

In the second chapter, “Coinage and Monetary Systems,” Yoon moves from larger economic trends to consider the formal qualities of medieval money and its social role. Regarding its social implications, money, he remarks, allows “a government to speak to the general public” by “literally put[ting] its messages into people’s hands” (45). As Wolfthal later notes in chapter six, “coins were probably the most widely disseminated objects bearing images in the Middle Ages, and they permeated medieval visual culture” (187), underlining the significance of the imagery found on these small metal disks. Yoon elucidates the formal changes imagery on coinage underwent during the medieval period, emphasizing the tendency to turn from a “generalized image of kingship” (45) to “more realistic, individualized portraits” of specific rulers while still maintaining “many of the same themes and ideas” (47).

Wolfthal shifts the conversation in chapter three, “Your Money or Your Eternal Life?” to highlight the eternal stakes of the accumulation of wealth in medieval ethics and the writings of mendicants, theologians, scholars, and poets warning against the misleading appeal of worldly possessions. Illustrating the dangers of wealth and avarice through a variety of media ranging from Bosch’s Death and the Miser to a late fifteenth-century woodcut from the Ars Moriendi depicting Temptation to Avarice, Wolfthal describes the moral dilemma faced by the growing middle class who encountered a plethora of pictorial and textual warnings against the accumulation of wealth for the sake of the salvation of their souls.     

In chapter four, “Will Money Damn Your Soul,” Wolfthal further discusses associations with avarice and introduces visual representations of the deadly sin through personifications and narrative scenes. She expands the conversation of the dangers posed by avarice from spiritual concerns regarding the soul’s salvation to worldly pursuits, such as love, as presented in the Roman de la Rose. Wolfthal recounts differing approaches to art production and manuscript decoration in the medieval period, citing Dietersdorfer, who claimed that lavishly illuminated books most appropriately honored God, and Thomas à Kempis, who maintained that “books should serve the interests of their reader’s mind, not the nice taste of him who doth look at them” (84). Although Wolfthal returns briefly to the “paradoxical” (121) concept of extravagant artistic commissions to depict good deeds, a deeper exploration of whether expensive religious artwork counted among the proper ways to spend money would have enriched this discussion. The present-day resonance of this paradox was underscored by the presentation of the Medieval Money exhibition within the extravagant former library of the wall-street titan J. Pierpont Morgan and the display of many precious illuminated manuscripts collected by and for this individual. Although the exhibition was displayed within the minimalist galleries of the Morgan’s modern extension, not within the Gilded Age library structure, the concern over one’s legacy resonates between the medieval subjects of the exhibition and the turn-of-the-century Robber Barons who often donated their vast private collections of art to foster the cultural education of the broader public. 

While chapter four focuses on improper ways to earn and spend money, chapter five, “Can Money Save Your Soul,” outlines the approved uses of money, namely: “charitable giving, embracing poverty, and purchasing indulgences” (119), all of which were believed to secure salvation of the soul. As noted by Wolfthal, visual representations of charity and almsgiving almost always represent the side of the wealthy patron giving alms, rather than the recipients. The church not only supported charitable giving and voluntary dispossession of wealth, but also mechanized the rhetoric on the salvific power of certain “approved” purchases in the sale of indulgences. Among the most provocative connections between religion and economy, the buying and selling of indulgences, is represented by a fourteenth-century exemplar in the exhibition, which illustrates this commodification of salvation. Beyond indulgences themselves, Jacques Le Goff, as cited by Wolfthal, “has proposed that the very idea of purgatory developed from new mercantile notions, such as the measurability of time, and new monetary practices, such as bookkeeping” (142).

Wolfthal sketches different ways through which merchants aimed to distance themselves from “avaricious usurers” (148) in chapter six, “Merchants and the Material Culture of Money,” exploring their selected representation through portraits. These portraits, such as Jan Gossart’s Portrait of a Merchant (1530), manifest a new “mercantile ideal” in which merchants depict themselves as “fruitful, industrious citizens whose labor and investments benefited the community” (148). Continuing to emphasize the complexly intertwined nature of money and religion in medieval culture, Wolfthal incorporates some of the exhibition’s most evocative objects exemplifying these entanglements: an illuminated register of creditors from Bologna (1394–95) and an oath of office in a minters’ codex from Avignon (1411). These monetary registers explicitly link the economic and religious through their visual depictions of textual references to Christ, the Virgin Mary, and specific saints, offering legitimacy to economic activity through explicitly religious imagery and text.

After chapters dedicated primarily to the wealthy and middle classes of the medieval period, Wolfthal turns to unaddressed questions relating to fortune and the poor in chapter seven, “Money Management.” As an exhibition fundamentally dedicated to art, it is unsurprising that the patrons of the works of art and luxury objects on display often force their way to the foreground. Wolfthal, however, concludes the catalog with a contemplation on the economically disenfranchised, pointing to the existence of extreme widespread poverty at a time of tremendous individual wealth. These medieval wealth disparities are echoed starkly in the grave wealth disparities apparent in our own society, and contemporary rhetoric that also echoes the distinctions made between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor in medieval society, dividing those deemed ‘‘worthy’’ of economic support from those condemned as suffering the consequences of their own folly. Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality offers readers and visitors a meticulous consideration of the anxieties regarding the accumulation and proper use of wealth in the past, appearing at a critical juncture in our own society, which economists and the media have referred to as a “New Gilded Age.”