Susan Mosher Stuard

Where History and Theory Interact: Frederic C. Lane on the Emergence of Capitalism

When do scholars transcend the locus of their research and their centuries of concentration? Frederic Chapin Lane (1900-1984) was as devoted a Venetianist as any native son but refused to limit his interests to Venetian history. In his day he was an honored medievalist, but he is equally celebrated as an early modernist today; indeed he might be perplexed by our need to demarcate the two eras, regarding such hard distinctions as untenable for the Italy he knew well. His publications span sixty years-more than a generation in terms of scholarship. He published his first scholarly article in 1924, just two years after the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) introduced his famous thesis on the origins of the West. Lane was reading proofs for his last book, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account, co authored with his former student Reinhold C. Mueller, at the time of his death in 1984.2 Over the six decades of his professional life he joined with other economists and historians to rethink-indeed, reconceive-patterns of European economic

Medieval Workshop: Toward a Theory of Consumption and Economic Change

This workshop addressed a question of concern to medieval economic history for over a generation. Frederic C. Lane called for a theory of consumption, and Carlo Cipolla and Robert Lopez have encouraged a more thorough investigation of the role of demand. Because demand is sometimes understood in terms of needs and of taste, it is often subsumed under the heading of social history, which characterizes and describes, while economic analysis has centered on studies of supply, with their more precise and quantifiable parameters.Will the largely descriptive tools at our disposal help us to understand how demand affected the early-modern economy? The workshop considered demand for goods and services and demand for money. The first three papers addressed the Mediterranean south, and the last three focused upon Europe north of the Alps.