“IT IS A MISFORTUNE THAT WE DESCRIBE MONEY BY A NOUN…” Monetary Practices in the Ancien Régime Between History and Economics (Italy, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)

The increasing integration of money into the daily lives of individuals has frequently been examined by historians and economists within the Darwinian framework of modernization. According to this view, individuals—by selecting increasingly efficient means of exchange—naturally came to the adoption of a shared intermediary—an optimal conduit for converting one type of good into another. The focus here is typically on physical objects. Yet to define and compare the value of goods or services being exchanged, a shared unit of account is essential. It is, in fact, the unit of account that renders barter materially feasible, even though in its idealized form it remains a theoretical construct. The Hayekian suggestion I wish to consider here is the idea of money not as a substance but as an adjective—something that describes certain properties of different things. This invites a shift in analytical emphasis away from money as an object, and towards the contexts and the ways in which it circulates. As Karl Polanyi also observed, there exists a fundamental issue of denomination linked to the contingent uses individuals make of objects or commodities. This phenomenon is, on the one hand, related to the structural indebtedness typical of individuals under the Ancien régime. On the other, it reflects the persistent uncertainty surrounding the value attributed to coinage itself. In this chapter, drawing upon archival sources, I aim to illustrate the concrete ways in which people employed precious objects as money and to examine some of the practical difficulties associated with the use of coinage. Since the most valuable and esteemed among these money-like goods were made of gold or silver, we may wonder why such materials were not more frequently transformed into coin—especially considering that minting was, in principle, unrestricted. The explanation does not lie in the cost of minting. Rather, the accumulation and utilization of precious metal objects by elite groups gradually leads us to a conceptual crossroads between economics and culture—where conspicuous consumption reveals a distinctive economic rationality.