ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Money, morality and the Monster: fragrances of pecunia in the Holy Roman Empire.
Author: BOND Niall
However inauspicious the context of Vespasian's words, "pecunia non olet", they resonate through the ages, as "Geld stinkt nicht" or "l'argent n'a pas d'odeur". Irrespective of whether the filthiness of lucre has varied from one European region to another, the social, religious and legal norms developed by actors with differing functions at different stages of monetisation and lending have framed ethical issues that have shaped economic analysis and prejudice. In the Holy Roman Empire, with its historic, geopolitical, constitutional and religious particularities, those issues are both confessional, as theological pluralism impacted attitudes towards interest, and political, as petty princes and Emperor disputed regal privileges and the public sphere wrestled to recover privatised minting rights. They are debated in the mints, where money's decline is seen as a moral scourge, on the markets, where just price arguments turn to considerations of market manipulation, by theologians in the Church and cameralists in the princes' chambres. Though a synthesis of these vantages is advocated by Leibniz, quantitative theories emerge elsewhere. The dialectics of utilitarian and mystic visions of money ultimately give birth, during the final agonies of Empire, to Historicism.
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