Hawkes, David. The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England. United States of America. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

1. The Culture of Usury in
Renaissance England
By David Hawkes
Bibliographic Entry:
Hawkes, David. The Culture of Usury in
Renaissance England. United States of
America. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
No copyright infringement intended. 1

2. Chapter 1
“Howe is the Worlde Chaunged”: The
Emergence of Usury
• It is clear that the people of early modern
England believed of usury as a novel, unpleasant,
and evil power in the land.
• Furthermore, the piece of information that usury
was primarily and a view rather than a practice
allowed it to spread out its limit beyond money
lending, and usury was also identified as the
driving force behind the rapid rise of the
consumer marketplace.
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3. Chapter 1
“Howe is the Worlde Chaunged”: The
Emergence of Usury
• Ideally, these were drawn from
Greek philosophy and the Bible,
but the wisdom of the ancients,
filtered through Patristic and
scholastic commentary, continued
to put in the picture on protest to
usury until the middle of the 17th
century.
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4.
Chapter 2: The Aristotelian and Biblical
Critiques
• For the followers of Aristotle, then,
the reason money cannot
reproduce is that it is not an
essence in itself, but a manifestation
of the value of other essences. The
essence of money is its lack of
essence; its substance is it’s in
substantiality.
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5.
Chapter 2: The Aristotelian and Biblical
Critiques
• Shared by the Aristotelian and the biblical
critiques of usury; early modern England was
mutually satisfied that usury was irrational to a
philosophical mind that meant that it was also
unjust, but many early modern minds were more
inclined to trust revelation than reason.
• It is helpful to apply the rational and ethical
criticisms that were leveled against usury in its
germinal form to the exponentially enlarged but
nevertheless basically parallel economic practices
of our own day. 5

6.
Chapter 3: The Theological Critique
• Usury was legal and yet sinful; it was based on a literalist
misreading of scripture, and on a preference for
representation above reality.
• This entire viewpoint the early modern mind perceived a
kinship between usury and Judaism, which they
understood as a legalistic, literalistic, and ritualistic
religion.
• Significantly, usury affects the psyche, and it also impacts
the material operations of people’s daily lives, although it
has an uncannily similar influence in each of these areas.
• The next chapter, it will turn our attention away from the
theoretical case against usury, to look into instead
objections to its dramatic and wicked practical effects on
society as a whole.
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7. Chapter 4: “Strange Metamorphosis”: The
Death of Hospitality
• In the early modern period, the
general idea of charity inclined to
shadow into the more obviously and
immediately topical view of
hospitality; the increase of usury was
frequently said to involve, as a
necessary consequence, the death of
hospitality remember that usury was
visualized as the opposite of
hospitality; it was everything that
hospitality was not.
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8. Chapter 4: “Strange Metamorphosis”: The
Death of Hospitality
• Usury was also understood to be a self-motivated
behind quite a specific shift in English class
relations: the flourishing of the mercantile interest
at the expense of the landed.
• However, is that magic works through the
intervention of Satan; that is the major difference
between the early modern mind and our own, the
autonomous power of representation as a
metaphysically evil phenomenon, and they did.
• The next chapter will attempt to suggest some
reasons why.
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9. Chapter 5: Magic, Labor, and Allegory:
Imagining the Usurer
• The usurer makes believe that his money increases
independently, but in reality the only possible source
of value or benefit is the labor of man.
• The classification that fills the role
of labor power in their thought is
best conceived as human life itself; it
is human subjective activity
measured as a whole, rather than
individual acts of production or
consumption, that the usurer steals
and exploits.
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10. Chapter 5: Magic, Labor, and Allegory:
Imagining the Usurer
• The fact that Renaissance England could foresee
usurers simultaneously as worn-out misers and
excessive hogs indicates that such tropes were not
understood as designating empirical
characteristics of actual usurers, but rather as
figural expressions of various theoretical features
of usury.
• In the next chapter, we will look at how this fluid;
shifting literary characterization of the usurer is
attached to the diverse social forms actually taken
by this figure in Renaissance England.
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11. Chapter 6: “Tramplers of Time”: Alchemists,
Goldsmiths, and Sodomites
• Burton describes the process by which usury acquires
subjective agency in detailed, allegorical form. Usury
is in money, commodities, and exchange as a whole;
this means that it is also in the human mind, it is said
to control the mind so completely as to yield control
the entire individual.
• We have already seen on how usury itself was
representing as a temptation, in consequence, usurers
and their agents played the dual Satanic roles, first of
tempter and then of accuser. Debt was incessantly
likened to punishment, and debtor’s prison, which
was a real and immediate threat to tens of thousands
of early modern Londoners, was imagined, accurately
enough, as hell. 11

12. Chapter 6: “Tramplers of Time”: Alchemists,
Goldsmiths, and Sodomites
• The people of Renaissance England as an entirely
expectable consequence of our society’s domination
by usury, it was naturally and automatically and,
surely, correctly presumed that usury’s rise to
power would be accompanied by consequences for
sexuality, politics, philosophy, and psychology.
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13. Thank you!!!
Have a great History Week 2012
and good luck with Final exam!!
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