The moral economy is an idea that has loomed large in social history from the 1960s onwards. This latest outing is a book of considerable scope and ambition, ranging across western Europe through the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and touching on a wide variety of ideas, practices, places, and cultures along the way. Perhaps surprisingly, it does not address the moral economy head on, only (briefly) discussing Thompson in the conclusion; rather, it does so by exploring the relationship between status, economic institutions, and the individual through the lens of credit. Fontaine sees credit and debt as central to the lives of everyone in the early-modern period: men and women, rich and poor – indeed, despite the title, the argument turns on wealth as much as poverty. As others have argued, credit involved business transactions and systems of obligation; it set the individual into a social as well as economic that gave them identity and belonging as well as providing a means for economic survival or prosperity. Fontaine identifies and contrasts two competing cultures: one based on aristocratic values of obligation and centered on the gift; the other urban, commercial and centered on profit and the market. Thus, the town and the merchant are held up as symbols of modernity, but their counterpoint is found less in Thompson's (revolutionary) peasant and more in the rich and powerful aristocrats who drew together and personified the older system. In exploring the conflict, congruence and eventual transition between the two cultures, Fontaine assesses the changing role of institutions—the church, state, guilds, and charitable organisations—and the ways in which individual attitudes to credit were moulded and remoulded in response to these, but also through the practices of everyday life. Transition in the logic and culture of the economy thus runs alongside the day-to-day problems and practicalities of making a living, meeting one's financial and social obligations, and keeping up appearances. Fontaine's analysis is thus rich with the granular detail of individual stories while painting a much larger picture of social, cultural, and economic change.

Both the impressive granularity and the broad geographical and historical coverage are achieved by drawing on a wide range of secondary material. Much of this discusses the situation in France, but there is also an impressive array of reading on Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and, to a lesser extent, Germany. This allows the argument to be nuanced with local and national variations, for example, in the changing role of the church, the legal framework for female economic activity, and state involvement in poor relief through pawnshops—England emerging as exceptional in many of these, in part because it is the one protestant country discussed in real detail. While primary archival sources may be thin on the ground, there is no shortage of rich empirical detail, and there is always time in the broader argument to explore in detail the life of an individual or the development of a particular institution. And Fontaine is also willing to draw on literary sources, offering a detailed reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice to explore the tension between aristocratic and capitalist cultures. Given this rich source material, it is a shame that there is no bibliography through which the reader can explore the literature. On a similar note, the absence of an index makes it difficult to pick up threads of the argument as they run through several of the chapters. Concern with these practicalities is a little pedantic, yet is important in navigating through a book, which is so wide-ranging.

The central thread of credit leads us down numerous avenues: the dramatic growth of state pawnshops, the role of information asymmetries in commercial transaction, the position of the church in relation to usury, the position of intermediaries (often women) between aristocratic and commercial cultures of credit—the list could go on. Each of these adds to Fontaine's overall argument, which is thought-provoking and topical. Indeed, her conclusion makes the link between past and present explicit: a moral economy is alive and well in the twenty-first century, for example, through the activities of the Grameen Bank in India. On the one hand, this suggests that the past is perhaps not so much of a foreign country; on the other, it emphasizes the fact that any transition from aristocratic to capitalist cultures of credit was partial and contingent. We might press this further and suggest that these are best seen as ideal types—an analytical device. Reality is always more complex, of course: a blurring of the two cultures which was marked, for example, by commercially-minded aristocrats managing their estates and their spending according to modern accounting systems and by shopkeepers using the rhetoric of friendship to enhance their reputation and businesses. In exploring both the archetypes and the liminal world between them, Fontaine demonstrates the complexity and contingency of both moral and market economies.