EXHIBIT: MEDIEVAL MONEY AT THE MORGAN

Is it ironic that the Morgan Library and Museum is opening an ambitious exhibition about money in the Middle Ages?

Maybe, maybe not. Suitable was the word that Deirdre Jackson used. She is the on-site curator of Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality, an exhibition that follows the rise of the monetary economy in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, long before J. Pierpont Morgan helped to cement the foundations of modern America's financial infrastructure.

It looks at the ways that money redefined life, culture and politics in medieval Europe. The sound of money even worked its way into music: A 14th-century madrigal by Lorenzo Masini mimicked clinking coins.

And the themes that took root then are as relevant as ever, the Morgan's director, Colin B. Bailey, wrote in the exhibition catalog, as people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values and morality.

The exhibition gave the curators — Diane Wolfthal, a professor emerita at Rice University, and Dr. Jackson — an opportunity to rethink some of the Morgan's prized holdings, including illuminated manuscripts like The Hours of Henry VIII and the Prayer Book of Claude de France.

The interesting thing about money is it hits everything in society, Dr. Jackson said. Poverty was widespread in the Middle Ages even as most people, even the poor, were caught up in the new monetary economy, Dr. Jackson said. Famines, which were common in medieval Europe, would have hit the poorest people the hardest, she said.

Simultaneously, the foundations of banks were being laid, and new financial instruments were coming into being that let people pay for merchandise without metal coins. It's a lot easier to have pieces of paper than big pieces of metal to finance your business dealings, Dr. Jackson said.

But coins were pervasive, and to show what was in medieval money chests and brass alms boxes, the curators placed a clump of coins as the first item visitors will see.

 

Medieval Money also displays gold ducats, coins with images of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain minted in Castile in the late 15th or early 16th centuries. By then there was nothing new about coins: The earliest ones found outside of China were discovered in the ruins of a Greek temple in Lydia, in what is now Turkey.

But as people started making more money in the Middle Ages, it was the spread of low-value coinage that allowed more people — and more classes of people — to participate in the economy. Now there were bankers, money changers, pawnbrokers and traders who reached beyond their immediate surroundings. Financial centers brought in outsiders: Italian merchants who did business at the Beurse, or stock exchange, in Bruges lived in an expatriate community in that Flemish city.

And as the new commercial economy spread, people started to worry about the ethical and religious ramifications of getting rich, because wealth seemed to contradict the Christian ideals of poverty and charity.

In a book published to accompany the exhibition, Dr. Wolfthal writes that merchant bankers in the 14th and 15th centuries were plagued by anxiety about some of their business practices. She also noted that as late as the 16th century, Martin Luther declared that trade can be nothing but robbing and stealing the property of others.

To read the complete article, see:
The Good, and Evil, of Money at the Morgan (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/arts/design/money-morgan-library-exhibition.html)

For more information, see:
Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality (https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/medieval-money)

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