Events

Italian Academy Fellow Dr. James Norrie will present "Re-coining the Eleventh Century: Monetisation, Religion, and Value in Italy." James Norrie specializes in economic and social history of medieval Italy and is a fellow at the Italian Academy in 2019-2020. After receiving his DPhil from Oxford in 2017, he published several articles and is currently working on his first monograph under contract with  OUP, tentatively titled “Urban Change and Radical Religion: Medieval Milan, c. 990-1140.”

"The religious reform movement in Italy against simony which took hold from the 1050s had explosive social and political consequences. While popes and treatise-writers denounced the traffic in religious offices and sacraments, ordinary men and women from Milan to Florence took to the street in riots of anti-clerical violence. While historians have long identified a connection between new anxieties about simony and rising monetisation in the eleventh century, the causes of their precise chronology and geography remain poorly understood. This paper addresses this problem, by looking less at the increased circulation of coinage and more at the changing social roles it was put to. As well as presenting insights from the social anthropology and comparative history of money use, the paper will compare the history of exchange and religious revolt in different Italian cities."

Please note that Dr. Wayne Storey, previously scheduled to speak on December 3, will be presenting in the Spring.