Power and Profit

Peter Spufford's Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe is not an easy read. It's pretty hefty, for one thing - more than 400 quarto pages, not counting endmatter. It's also rather dense. My first attempt to read it foundered somewhere in the first chapter, after which I set it aside for a year or so. But if you're interested in how things work in human society, and how modern Europe began to come to be, reading this book is rewarding. Details under the cut.

( Medieval Commerce )

The book is, as I say, very dense, and the details can be overwhelming, but overall I found it very much worth reading.