When The Economic History Review Takes Notice

Giovanni Patriarca's scholarship on Franciscan monetary thought earns prominent mention in one of the field's most prestigious literature surveys

One of the surest signs that a scholar’s work is making an impact is when it gets picked up and discussed in a major review of the field. That’s exactly what happened with Giovanni Patriarca’s research on Franciscan monetary theory, which received extended and favorable treatment in The Economic History Review‘s authoritative “Review of periodical literature for 2024: 1100–1500,” published earlier this year.

The review, authored by Stephanie Emma Brown of the University of Hull, surveys the most significant scholarship in late medieval economic and social history published in 2024. Out of the many articles and studies considered, Patriarca’s “A Franciscan monetary theory? Alexander Bonini and the forms of money at the end of the middle ages” is singled out as a key contribution to the field’s “rich global scope.” Brown places Patriarca’s work alongside studies of monetization in medieval Japan and Bulgaria, noting that together these contributions reveal how monetization across the medieval world was “not merely a technical or economic process but a deeply cultural one.”

Here is part of what Brown writes about Patriarca’s contribution:

Patriarca’s analysis of Franciscan monetary thought in late mediaeval Western Europe introduces a third dimension: the intellectual and theological engagement with money itself. Patriarca examines how Alexander Bonini, a Franciscan thinker, challenged Aristotelian notions of the sterility of money by recognizing the social utility of money-changers and the circulation of currency. Bonini’s treatise De Usuris not only defended the costs associated with financial mediation but also laid the groundwork for modern monetary doctrines. His pragmatic approach, which was rooted in the Franciscan ethos of voluntary poverty, extended to theories of contracts, price formation, and the composition of currencies, often supported by sophisticated mathematical and statistical reasoning. Figures such as Nicole Oresme, writing in the fourteenth century, echoed and refined these debates in works such as De Moneta, where he distinguished between banking, usury, and coinage debasement, each with its own moral and economic implications. The Franciscan legacy, as Patriarca shows, also manifested institutionally through the Montes Pietatis, charitable pawnbrokers that offered microcredit to the emerging urban classes, alleviating the burden of interest and expanding access to capital. These institutions, rooted in Central Italy, eventually spread across Europe and into the ‘Spanish’ Americas, underscoring the transregional impact of Franciscan economic thought.

This is a remarkable acknowledgment. The Economic History Review is one of the premier journals in the discipline, and its annual literature reviews set the terms of scholarly conversation. To be featured so prominently, and in a passage that highlights the originality, breadth, and lasting institutional significance of the Franciscan economic tradition, is a testament to the quality and importance of Patriarca’s research.

The article Brown highlights is included in Patriarca’s new book, At the Frontiers of Scholasticism: Scientific Method, Innovation, and Economic Reasoning, published by the Acton Institute. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the book dismantles the myth that the medieval world was an intellectual backwater by showing how Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits laid the foundations for the scientific method, modern mathematics, and economic reasoning—long before the Enlightenment claimed credit.

The chapter on Franciscan monetary theory is one of the book’s most fascinating. What Brown’s review confirms is that this isn’t just an interesting historical curiosity. It’s serious, field-shaping scholarship that is changing how economic historians understand the medieval origins of modern finance. From Alexander Bonini’s defense of money-changers to the Montes Pietatis, charitable pawnbrokers that spread from Central Italy across Europe and into the Americas, the Franciscan economic legacy turns out to be far more sophisticated and consequential than most people realize.

The book is now available in ebook and paperback: At the Frontiers of Scholasticism