Book Review: Adam J. Davis. The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce, and the Rise of the Hospital.
From American Historical Review, March 31, 2023:
Adam J. Davis’s The Medieval Economy of Salvation locates the twelfth- and thirteenth-century hospital movement at a nexus between the medieval transition from gift to commercial profit economy and its concomitant “charitable revolution,” whose spirituality transmuted almsgiving to the poor into “loans to God,” with redemptive reward monetized as interest. This juxtaposition is not newly discovered, nor is the author’s assertion that evidence of such gifts and countergifts between donors and hospitals challenges previous historiographical assumptions that the commercial profit economy had fully replaced the gift economy. In his 1978 classic Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, Lester Little pointed out that “Largess no more disappeared after 1050 than did plundering. It remained a hallmark of the life led by the European aristocracy, and as a model for the life of successful merchants and professionals. It was to be seen not only in their clothes, their homes, their gifts, and their entertainments, but in their works of charity and support of religious institutions. What remained of the gift-economy behaviour was thus complementary to commerce; it no longer opposed, or restrained, commercial activity” (8). With respect to hospitals in particular, Little wrote: “Consistent with the general scholastic theory on the efficacy of good works, philanthropy thus held one of the keys to the justification of profit-making. The small-scale, local pawnbroker continued to be harassed by officials, but the merchant-bankers were well on their way to assuming their role as patrons of charity. The proliferation of various types of hospital is one of the leading manifestations of the new style of philanthropy” (213).
What is new and important in Davis’s monograph therefore appears not in the historiographical framing chapters (introduction and chapter 1), though they are meticulously and articulately conveyed to the advantage of those new to this subject matter, but rather in subsequent chapters in which he deftly lays out exactly how the new commercial profit economy transformed the traditional gift economy—namely, through the new financial instruments and assets of rents and sales of property and land comprising the investment portfolios of urban commercial elites.
Here we can distinguish alms generated by market profits from alms by agricultural production. And here we can comprehend not only the theological “charitable landscape” onto which hospitals were mapped (see chapter 2) but also the profit-generating commercial markets with which hospitals themselves were intimately implicated through receipt of endowment alms in the form of rents and properties. One could then say market-based donors as well as the market-based wealth they bequeathed to hospitals transformed these charitable institutions into the patrons’ own monetized image and discourse, including their religious anxieties about the profit economy. Hospitals from their founding were thus capitalized businesses offering both potentes and pauperes redemptive “credit” and corporeal palliative services. Thus, Davis brings nuance to Little’s larger vision of the emerging twelfth- and thirteenth-century penitential piety of redemption through charitable patronage using market-derived wealth.
As chapters 3 (“Hospital Patrons and Social Networks”) and 4 (“Managing a Hospital’s Property”) make vividly clear, a significant aspect of the business of hospitals resides in their managerial needs. The sick, poor, aged, and indigent had to be cared for, to be sure, but so did the institutional endowment portfolio of properties and rents of various kinds. And benefactor relations were an ongoing social management obligation of hospital administrators, since patrons not only expected spiritual benefits but also social recognition and private access to the resources of the hospital when sick or aged. Such was the macroeconomy of charity and salvation in which the microeconomy of an individual hospital functioned.
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darryll jones