The Early Growth of the Medieval Economy of Salvation in Latin Christianity

Abstract

The Early Growth of the Medieval Economy of Salvation in Latin ChristianityThe last thirty years have seen a wealth of research on death, dying and the dead in Latin Christianity.Some scholars have focused on liturgy, ritual and the cult of the saints.Others have studied cemeteries, graves and epitaphs; relics and relic translations; visions of the afterlife; grants to religious communities for the care of the dead; or the records created to ensure that such care would be delivered, ideally in perpetuity.While research on this body of material has opened up rich and fascinating fields in the cultural history of Europe, it has not been brought together within a unifying framework.That is the object of this essay, which argues that all this varied human activity was bound together through a system of exchanges among the living, the dead, and the court of the living God -a 'medieval economy of salvation'.The multiplicity of connections within this system, the complexity of the exchanges involved, and the fact that the currency included tangible assets, like labour, land, and treasure, add up to something like an economy as we understand it today.But it was also very different, especially in the early and central Middle Ages, before the mercantile culture of Europe took off.Whatever practitioners of the economics of religion might think, the early medieval Church bears only a superficial resemblance to a modern multinational corporation.1 The medieval economy of salvation deserves to be understood on its own terms as a peculiarly distinctive and dynamic product of the religious and social practices of people who adopted Latin Christianity as their religion but also adapted it to the needs of their families and communities.Three historical watersheds will frame our discussion.The first, on either side of the year 400, defines the border between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.The second watershed more traditionally divides the early from the later Middle Ages, before and after the year 1100.The third is the late medieval/early modern watershed defined by the reformations of the sixteenth century.While working within the historical parameters established by these three models, we will focus on the period between the first and second water-1 See Robert B.

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