Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France

FAIN: FT-54744-07

Jotham Wood Parsons
Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA 15282-0001)

To begin writing a book with the working title "Making Money in Early Modern France," which investigates the crucial role that the currency and its regulation played in an emerging national state in the later sixteenth century. The project, for which research is largely complete, is based on both printed and archival sources, particularly those produced by the Cour des Monnaies, the administrative and judicial body in charge of money and precious metals. The sources shed light on the emergence of a "modern," bureaucratic and monetized society; they also reveal the deep ambivalence that such modernization induced in a still deeply traditional and aristocratic society, an ambivalence that still has echoes today.

Associated Products

Making Money in Sixteenth Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (Book)
Title: Making Money in Sixteenth Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State
Author: Jotham Parsons
Abstract: Coinage and currency -- abstract and socially created units of value and power -- were basic to early modern society. By controlling money, the people sought to understand and control their complex, expanding, and interdependent world. In Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France, Jotham Parsons investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise. The Cour des Monnaies, Parsons shows, played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. Parsons's broad, multidimensional portrait of money in early modern France also encompasses the literature of the age, in which money's arbitrary and dangerous power was a major theme.
Abstract: Coinage and currency—abstract and socially created units of value and power—were basic to early modern society. By controlling money, the people sought to understand and control their complex, expanding, and interdependent world. In Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France, Jotham Parsons investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise. The Cour des Monnaies, Parsons shows, played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. Parsons's broad, multidimensional portrait of money in early modern France also encompasses the literature of the age, in which money's arbitrary and dangerous power was a major theme.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100031010
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8014-515
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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