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Jotham Parsons. Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State .

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 121; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/121.2.658

1937-5239

Brian Sandberg,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Jotham Parsons’s Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State is a welcome addition to a growing historiography on currency, debt, and capitalism in early modern Europe. Parsons uses the Pinatel affair, a scandal involving corruption and fraud by mint officials in the 1550s, in order to open a window into the operations of minting and monetary policy in sixteenth-century France. The book provides a detailed institutional history of the Chambre des Monnaies (later the Cour des Monnaies), its officers, and its role in regulating monetary policies in early modern France. In response to the Pinatel affair, Henri II launched a series of monetary reforms and elevated the Chambre des Monnaies to the status of a sovereign court. Henri II articulated his ambition to regulate monetary policy and control coinage through centralizing and rationalizing impulses that never fully materialized. Parsons develops an extended analysis of French humanists’ logic of economic regulation, identifying strains of Aristotelian thought that influenced early modern French notions of mercantilism and political economy. Parsons focuses on the writings of Michel de Montaigne, Jean Bodin, Louis le Roy, Guillaume de la Perrière, and Jacques Colas in order to demonstrate anxieties about money in sixteenth-century French political thought. Surprisingly, the book only briefly discusses Antoine de Montchrestien’s Treatise of Political Economy and Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully’s Memoirs on the Wise and Royal Economies of State. Political theorists, clerics, and intellectuals embraced alchemical experimentation to fabricate the “noble metal” (247). The “monetary imaginary” in Renaissance France celebrated gold, but at the same time worried about its corrupting influences. Drawing on the analysis of gold in the material culture of the French Renaissance in Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (2005), Parsons argues that during the second half of the sixteenth century “gold became increasingly a symbol of mutability and instability and of the wasteful and unnatural aspects of court culture” (259).