Hannah Skoda

Enough-ness in the Later Middle Ages

The concept of sufficiency—what it meant to have enough—was fundamentally a religious category in early modern England, debated through a series of scriptural passages, notably the petition in the Lord’s Prayer for daily bread. In the era of the Reformation, Protestant writers interpreted these passages to require the equitable redistribution of wealth so that everyone might have enough. In the increasingly capitalist context of Elizabethan and Stuart England, however, these passages were reinterpreted to authorize private wealth, culminating in the work of John Locke, for whom the accumulation of riches represented sufficiency rather than excess because money, unlike bread, does not spoil. This article thus traces the process by which the Christian ethics of sufficiency ceased to provide a theoretical constraint upon capitalism.