Tom Johnson (York) presents “Reckoning and Economic Life in Late-Medieval England”

What was the medieval economy? To answer this question, we need a clearer conception of our written evidence and how it related to this economy. This paper argues that we need to understand the role played by writing as a technology of the economic. Drawing on fifteenth-century rural account books as a case study, it explores the way that material, formal, and visual features gave ‘texture’ to the medieval economy, shaping the possibilities of calculative thought and action.