A Cultural History of Money
General Editor: Bill Maurer
Volume 1
A Cultural History of Money in Antiquity
Edited by Stefan Krmnicek
Volume 2
A Cultural History of Money in the Medieval Age
Edited by Rory Naismith
Volume 3
A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance
Edited by Stephen Deng
Volume 4
A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment
Edited by Christine Desan
Volume 5
A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empire
Edited by Federico Neiburg and Nigel Dodd
Volume 6
A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age
Edited by Taylor C. Nelms and David Pedersen
Rebecca Darley is Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. She researches and publishes on the role of coins as social and economic tools, especially in peninsular India and the Byzantine Empire in the first millennium CE . She is currently completing a monograph on the western Indian Ocean in Late Antiquity.
Laurent Feller is Professor of Medieval History at the University Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne. His interests are in early and high medieval social and economic history, and his field of specialization is medieval Italy. He is particularly interested in agrarian history and has published Paysans et Seigneurs au Moyen ge (Paris, 2007, 2nd edition, 2018).
Svein H. Gullbekk is Professor in Numismatics and History of Money at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on studies of coinage in a broader context of Viking and medieval Scandinavia and particularly the relationship between religion and money.
Richard Kelleher is Assistant Keeper of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. His research interests include monetization and coin use in medieval and early modern Britain, the coinage of the Crusader states, and the secondary lives of coins. His publications include A History of Coinage in Medieval England (2015).
Rory Naismith is Lecturer in Medieval British History at Kings College London. He is interested in early medieval economic and social history, particularly as it pertains to money (coined and otherwise). Major publications include Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 8: Britain and Ireland c. 4001066 (2017) and Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: the Southern English Kingdoms 757865 (2012).
Giacomo Todeschini worked for many years as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Trieste (19792016). His studies focus on the development of medieval and modern economics, exclusion from citizenship and market games, and the economic and political meaning of Jews in Christian society. He has researched and lectured as a fellow or member at the cole normale suprieure, Paris, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Beijing University, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Oliver Volckart is Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests lie in medieval and early modern history, specifically constitutional history, institutional change, market integration, and the monetary and financial history of the Holy Roman Empire.
When the British Museum decided in 2012 to redesign Room 68, the hall containing objects from its Department of Coins and Medals, its curators made a bold departure from how numismatic material had conventionally been displayed. Rather than cases filled with rows upon rows of gold, silver, and bronze coins of European antiquity, the new gallery design featured all manner of objects, not limited to coin or paper currency, capturing the history of transactional artifacts and infrastructures from shells to mobile phones. Each case had a theme: cases on one side of the gallery spotlighted moneys institutional supports and issuing authorities, while cases on the other underscored all the myriad ways people use money, not just for exchange or payment but for ritual or religious observance, political contestation, adornment, and storytelling.
The intention in preparing these six volumes was to provide readers with a similar experience, inviting them into the wonder-cabinets of money in all its variegation, multiplicity, and complexity. What emerges is moneys irreducible plurality, the multiple stories it tells. Money opens windows into plural economic and moral worlds, too, worlds of value and evaluation, wealth and worth. Never merely coin, cash, or credit rendered in strictly economic terms, money is so much more than the old couplet would have it: Money is a matter of functions four: a medium, a measure, a standard, a store. Instead, money is always also a medium of communication, a set of instruments with which people exchange messages with one anotherabout price, to be sure, but also about political conviction and authority, fealty, desire, or disdain. And money is a method of memorializing the past so that relations established among people, institutions, the gods, and the ancestors can be carried forward through the present and into near, distant, and imaginary futures.
Money is in this sense both irredeemably cultural and historical, and so it is apt that this six-volume Cultural History of Money should spotlight moneys relation to religion, technology, the arts, and literature, everyday life, metaphysical interpretation, and a wide variety of issues of the age. While many contributors to the first several volumes are numismatists and archaeologists, trucking in the material evidence of coin and bullion, the volumes also contain contributions from scholars of digital infrastructures, literary and legal historians and science fiction scholars, sociologists and anthropologists, economists and artists.
Archaeologists have long bemoaned the fact that the great majority of ancient coins in museums and private collections today were unearthed without any data having been collected on their surrounding context, rendering much of the ancient and even more recent past a mystery. Even where the context for a particular find is present, its interpretation is always ambiguous. In the contemporary period, money is surrounded by contextcables and wireless signals, data protocols and computer servers, lobbying groups and legislators voluminous writings, television soap operas and online social media. Yet just as with ancient hoards, we have difficulty escaping our own assumptions about what money is, what people do with it, and the style with which they do so.
Take a basic plastic credit card transaction at a physical till. How many users of this everyday payment device would be able to explain how it works? How would a museum curate this technological assemblage? Moving from the simple act of paying to more involved interactions with money, how might an archaeologist of the future deduce, for example, the practice in some central Asian Muslim immigrant communities known as the Imam Zamin, which consists of wrapping a coin in a piece of cloth tied about the upper arm to protect a traveler? Or the practice from around 20052009 of what people called doing tuning() to a transit card in Seoul, Koreadissolving the plastic payment card with acetone so as to remove the radio-frequency identification (RFID) antenna and chip, and creatively stitching it into ones pocketbook, bracelet, or the elbow patches of ones blazer, so you can breeze through the turnstile, with style?
