IMC 2019: Sessions
Session 119: Materialities at Birkbeck, I: Between Mind and Matter in Medieval Monetary Policy
Monday 1 July 2019, 11.15-12.45
| Sponsor: | Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London / Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds |
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| Organiser: | Rebecca Darley, Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London |
| Moderator/Chair: | Jonathan Jarrett, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds |
| Paper 119-a | Discourses on Absence, or Kalabhra and Vakataka Monetary Policy in Early Medieval Southern India (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Numismatics |
| Paper 119-b | Surplus and Scarcity: The Contested Relationship between Monetary Supply and Aristocratic Land Management in Comnenian Byzantium (Language: English) Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Economics - General, Numismatics |
| Paper 119-c | The Lighter Dirham: A North African Exception to the Rule of Abbasid Monetary Stability through the 8th and 9th Centuries (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Numismatics |
| Abstract | Coins are tiny objects, each a unique record of the many hands that designed, created and used them. Study of the materiality of coins - their appearance, composition and modification - has at least as long a history as the theorisation of monetary policy. A gulf often remains, however, between close analysis of coins and their roles as actors in medieval ritual and social process, and discussions of economic strategy or constraint. These three papers take a global, comparative perspective on the relationships between coins as singular, material manifestations of political contracts or economic ideals, and the governmental structures that oversaw their creation. It thereby poses questions relevant to any consideration of the ways that collective and individual states of mind are imprinted on, and negotiated in, the everyday. |