Burying Money? Monetary Origins and Afterlives of Luther's Reformation

Philipp Rössner

History of Political Economy, 2016, vol. 48, issue 2, 225-263

Abstract: The article offers a new interpretation of Martin Luther as an economic thinker, as well as the monetary economic origins of the Reformation of 1517. The argument is presented in six sections. The first one outlines key points in Luther's biography relevant for the present purpose. A second section discusses the basic features of Luther's economic “theory.†This gives rise to a brief discussion of the development of the money supply in Germany in the period and the most likely development in the velocity of the circulating coins. Both are important for setting the context of the quite peculiar economic discourses on pilgrimages, balance-of-payment deficits, and indulgences that were prominent in the early 1520s in the German lands. Martin Luther picked up directly on the economic situation and economic discourses of his day, which were marked by crisis and depression. Debates on indulgences and balance-of-payment constraints waged by the humanists and early reformers of the 1520s thus “created†the Reformation of 1517. These debates also stood at the heart of a long proto-Keynesian tradition in Continental European economic thought that emphasized, since the Middle Ages, the need to spend or invest money rather than letting it lie idle.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-3494120 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:hop:hopeec:v:48:y:2016:i:2:p:225-263

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().