Liana Farber has produced an elegant account of medieval writing on trade by successfully wading through a widely divergent body of sources. Her endeavor is crowned by a brilliant take on late medieval European literary evidence. The author convincingly makes a number of points: Medieval authors disagreed widely on trade and focused on its social effects, not on its mechanics. Indeed, they did not describe trade, but sought to justify it as a tool fostering the “common good.” Moreover, they discussed trade as one part of a larger process of conceptualizing not how the world worked, but rather how it ought to work. This book supplements the limited literature on the topic of pre-industrial “trade theory,” and helps to counter the often static, ahistorical representations of the medieval past constructed by later authors.

Chapter 1 argues that value, consent, and community were the assumed constitutive elements of medieval writings trying to justify trade in light of its usefulness to the “common good.” Chapter 2 discusses value, and shows that while most accounts of trade assumed a clear process of valuation, no such thing is to be found in medieval writings on value. Similarly, Chapter 3 argues that while consent was universally assumed to be a clear-cut matter, a study of medieval marriages shows us that it was actually a concept almost impossible to define. In Chapter 4 Farber begins by describing what a working community was imagined to be, then turns to urban life in late medieval London to challenge the idea that the “common good” is something easy to define or to achieve through trade. She is not arguing against trade here; she is simply fashioning the last building block of her main point, namely that medieval authors wrote accounts not of trade as it was, but as it should have been.

One is left to wonder, however, whether consent in marriage is the best way to understand agreement in the marketplace, even the medieval one. Is external compulsion in the marketplace clarified by discussing Chaucer's take on an episode (from Livy and the Roman de la Rose) about a girl who consents to her death to escape losing her virginity “improperly” (Chapter 3)? Farber's juxtaposing “the myth of unified community in St Erkenwald” (a fourteenth-century poem) with her own interpretation of the realities of late medieval London (Chapter 4) takes her beyond her realm of expertise and over-develops what is an ancillary argument in her book. Sometimes the topic of trade and its legitimate exercise seems a pretext for discussing European medieval intellectuals' views of value, consent, and community.

Farber excels in applying close textual analysis to reveal how medieval thinkers imagined trade, and she provides an outstanding anatomy of their writings on trade. Of course, no one can master all disciplines, so the occasional references to economics, economic thought, and the medieval economy, areas that require a grasp of either economics or economic anthropology, seem misplaced in a book that is at its best when discussing more ethereal and indeed scholastic matters. Such excessive ambition notwithstanding, Farber's work greatly enhances our understanding of the “economic thought” of the intellectual elite of the European Middle Ages.