The dual currency system of Renaissance Europe

Luca Fantacci

Financial History Review, 2008, vol. 15, issue 1, 55-72

Abstract: The monetary system of late medieval and early modern Europe has been commonly described as irrational, in the light of later commodity money standards. In particular, the alterations in the legal value and/or in the metal content of most coins throughout this period have been regarded as a source of disorder and as a product of ignorance and abuse. This article suggests that the whole system, and its apparently awkward articulations, may have been deliberately designed to ensure complementarity between domestic and foreign trade. From this perspective, monetary alterations appear as the levers of a peculiar form of monetary policy, with an extra degree of freedom compared to more modern instruments, and equally open to being managed or mismanaged.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:fihrev:v:15:y:2008:i:01:p:55-72_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Financial History Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().