The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between political authority and economic change in the tenth to twelfth centuries AD. This is often interpreted as a period of dramatic economic and political upheaval; enormous growth in commerce, the emergence of an urban network and increasingly centralised polities are all indicative of this process. Ireland has rarely been considered in discussion of this sort but analysis of Ireland’s political economy has much to contribute to the debate. This will be tackled through a consideration of the coinage struck in Ireland between c.995 and 1170 with focus upon the two themes of production and usage. In analysing this material the scale and scope of a monetary economy, the importance of commerce and the controlling aspects of royal authority will each be addressed. The approach deployed is also overtly comparative with material from other contemporary areas, particularly England and Norway, used to provide context. Ultimately, in seeking to analyse these questions within this comparative context, the issue of where economic agency behind changes in the European economy will be considered. Chapters 1 and 2 situate the research within the wider scholarly debate and precise historical context respectively. Chapters 3 to 6 are a consideration of the manner in which the Hiberno-Scandinavian coinage was produced and administered. This reassesses questions of the scale of production, administration and the role of royal authority in the production of the coinage based upon a comprehensive re-categorisation and re-dating of the material. Chapters 7 and 8 concern the use of coins in the urban environment of Dublin and across the entirety of Ireland, with coinage analysed within its archaeological contexts. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that monetary economy and levels of commerce were substantial, variable and yet relatively geographically constrained. When considered in relationship to contemporary political contexts, the importance of royal authority in directing the economy is determined to be minimal with agency behind economic change seen to rest with an urban, mercantile community.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has traditionally been viewed through the lens of his poetic masterpiece, the Commedia. While his so-called “minor” works, including the overtly political book four of Convivio and the treatise Monarchia, have been studied, much of this work tends to read Dante through the theologized, over-determined hermeneutic of the narrative of his poetic journey through the afterlife. Also, because of the overwhelming temptation to associate Dante’s place in intellectual history with his clerical contemporaries in Paris and Bologna, a similar trend (often combined with the first) reads Dante as merely an idiosyncratic but minor epigone of the scholastics in his non-poetic work. The latter vein of interpretation is very common and tends to generate interpretations of Dante’s political thought which see it as a predominantly abstract encounter with scholastic theology and philosophy in the context of the high medieval church-state conflicts, particularly in the contentious age of Popes Boniface VIII, Clement V, and John XXII and their bloody disputes with claimants to the Holy Roman throne and French and Aragonese monarchies over political control of northern Italian territories. While this kind of reading is not unwarranted—for Dante’s Monarchia does make strong claims in the late medieval church-state conflict and deploys a philosophical lexicon current with scholastic intellectuals of the time—many scholars have read Dante’s monarchical theory in Convivio and Monarchia exclusively as a response to and dialogue with the major scholastic and juridical writers, particularly of the “mirrors of princes genre,” on both sides of these political conflicts between Church-State claims to authority. This is not completely wrong, but in so doing many have, conversely, failed to understand that Dante is making a coherent and unique normative argument. Such readings fail to read Dante 1) as a real Florentine politician, 2) as an enthusiastic follower of Aristotelian paradigms (not merely a scholastic Aristotelian), 3) as a committed political secularist, and 4) as contextualized within the rich municipal, social, economic, and political histories of Florence and Medieval Italy. This study thus moves away from previous approaches to Dante’s political thought and does a close re-reading of Convivio and Monarchia in a properly historicized framework, inspired by the work of Ernst Curtius and modern historicist methodology, contextualizing it in 13th and 14th century history. In particular, the study departs from Dante’s denunciation of greed in his lyrics, Commedia, Convivio, and Monarchia to establish the fact —through extensive research in economic history, commercial development, economic thought, political history, social history in medieval Italy etc.— that far from being a merely abstract denunciation of mammon or usury, like that found in the Bible and other theological writings, it is a unique and acerbic response to broad changes that can only be construed, on the basis of historical scholarship, in terms of the emergence of early capitalism in Florentine society around the early to mid 13th century. Chapter 1 serves as an initial overview of the whole study, also positioning it in relation to debates within the field of Dante studies; chapter 2 examines the international and political situation of Florence and Italy during Dante’s time; chapter 3 proposes a new historiography of this history and examines it as the development of “political economy”; chapter 4 explores the emergence of capitalism in Florence and Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries (also motioning to debates about the nature and definition of “political economy” and “capitalism”); finally, chapter 5 examines Aristotle’s critique of political economy in the Ethics and Politics, then pivots to Dante’s deployment of such Aristotelian paradigms in Convivio and Monarchia to both denounce the injustices generated by the intertwinement of politics and acquisitive monetary wealth-getting and to articulate a monarchical political model for stopping the deleterious effects of greed.

Cette thèse envisage les liens entre la ville de Bruxelles et ses campagnes, dans leurs aspects économiques et sociaux. Elle étudie l'impact de l'espace régional (partie de l'ancien pagus de Brabant) sur les conditions d'émergence de la ville et l'impact, ensuite, de la ville sur les structures régionales, en particulier aristocratiques. <p>Une première partie fait le point sur la croissance rurale et urbaine, sur ses protagonistes, ses modalités et sa chronologie. Que sait-on de l’espace régional avant l’an mil ?Comment se mettent en place les nouvelles structures seigneuriales laïques et ecclésiastiques attestées dans la région à partir du XIe siècle ?Comment se produisent les débuts du développement urbain pour la même époque ?Une deuxième partie tente de faire le point sur le rôle dans la région du prince territorial. Originaire de Louvain, mais implanté dans la région de Bruxelles dès le XIe siècle, quelle assise foncière y détenait-il ?Quelle politique monastique y a-t-il menée ?Quelle stratégie féodale et clientélaire a-t-il adoptée face à la société régionale en vue de construire et de développer son autorité seigneuriale ?Ce volet se consacre spécialement à l’étude et à l’évolution du groupe aristocratique traditionnel, notamment son rapport au prince et à la ville, de même qu’à l’émergence des nouveaux acteurs sociaux et à leur confrontation avec le prince et la société seigneuriale/The Ph.D Thesis considers the links between the city of Brussels and its countryside, in their economic and social aspects. It studies the impact of the regional space (part of the former pagus of Brabant) on the conditions for urbanisation and the impact of the city on regional structures, particularly aristocratic / Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation histoire / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished