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Published by EH.NET (December 2003) 
 
Eric Kerridge, _Usury, Interest and the Reformation_. Aldershot, UK: 
Ashgate, 2002. xv + 191 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7546-0688-0. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Norman Jones, Department of History, Utah State 
University. 
 
Eric Kerridge has been in the first rank of economic historians of early 
modern England since his _The Agricultural Revolution_ appeared in 1967, 
followed shortly by his _Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and 
After_ (1969), and several other books, including his important _Trade and 
Banking in Early Modern England_ (1983). Given his expertise in financial 
instruments and the ways in which trade and agriculture were actually 
carried out, this book holds out the promise of a nuts-and-bolts approach 
to usury and interest. Surprisingly, that is not what it delivers. Its 76 
pages of text present an overview of the intellectual history of the debate 
over usury in Germany and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. The book's thesis is summarized in its ultimate paragraph: "Yet 
even the gravest matters of scholarship are as nothing compared to the 
transcendental importance of acquitting Christians of the charge of having 
countenanced usury and usurers" (p. 76). 
 
The short text is accompanied by 38 documents, in their original languages 
as well as in translation, that provide proof texts for his argument. They 
are referenced in the body of the text, so that the reader can see at 
length the nature of the arguments under discussion. This feature usefully 
assembles bits of Aquinas, Bernardine of Siena, Calvin, Bullinger, Luther, 
Melanchthon, Zwingli, Wycliffe, Jewel, and a few others across a span of 
time from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. 
 
Kerridge contends that no historian of usury has understood what it was in 
law and theology, so he carefully lays out the legal definition of usury, 
as opposed to legal interest charges as permitted in the extrinsic titles 
of the canon law. As he rightly insists, "interest," which always involved 
risk, was legal, while "usury," a corrupt contract for certain gain on the 
sum lent, was never legal. In particular, Kerridge berates R.H. Tawney for 
his misunderstanding of Luther's thought on usury as represented in his 
_Religion and the Rise of Capitalism_ (a misunderstanding that is not in 
evidence in Tawney's edition of Thomas Wilson's _A Discourse on Usury_). 
Although Tawney bears the brunt of his critique, he dismisses all the main 
works on usury with a footnote. It seems that he believes that no one has 
understood this technical difference between usury and interest. 
 
It is a charge that comes as something of a surprise, but it arises, 
apparently, from a very different agenda than that of other students of 
usury. Tawney and Max Weber, Benjamin Nelson and John Noonan, and I, were 
interested in the interplay between religious ideology and the emergence of 
a particular kind of capitalism in the early modern period. We were 
concerned with how theologies were interpreted, how they were transmuted 
into law, how the individual conscience and the legal contract conformed to 
or fudged the official line on usury. It was always illegal, but what it 
was, in the popular mind, evolved. Although Kerridge is well aware of this 
evolution, he is concerned to correct the errors of both scholars and 
contemporary publics. 
 
Kerridge can say, rightly, that some Protestant theologians in Germany, 
Switzerland and England did not tolerate usury. But by concentrating on a 
few well-known theologians, he controls the outcome of his argument. 
Missing are the other voices in the debate. Anyone who has read Thomas 
Wilson's _Dialogue_ is aware that there were several conflicting 
interpretations of when and how the sin of usury occurred, and who was 
expected to regulate it. We are not informed, for instance, of the 
arguments of Johannes Eck, or Charles du Moulin, or Conrad Summenhart, or 
Louis Molina, or Navarrus over _census, lucrum cessans_, and the _mons 
pietatis_ that opened Christian ways around more conservative arguments. In 
particular, his definition of the Reformation as a purely Protestant affair 
removes the discussion of usury from the larger European context and allows 
him to ignore the fruitful thinking of the Spanish Jesuits on the subject. 
In that sense, Max Weber's _Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism_ 
lives on in Kerridge's conception of the problem. 
 
This little book provides a concise and very scholarly introduction to the 
arguments about usury, its definition in canon law and English law, and how 
interest was defined as different. It is immensely learned, too, with 
half-page footnotes and all quotes in both the original languages and in 
translation. The reader, however, is dropped in at the deep end of 
definition, and he or she must read with care in order to keep the 
technical arguments straight. But does it advance our understanding of the 
possible links between Protestantism and evolving attitudes toward secured 
loans at interest? Not really. He does prove that some Protestant 
theologians insisted that usury remained a sin, and that many people 
confused usury and interest, but he is not interested in pushing his 
argument beyond this. To demonstrate that a theologian of the early 
sixteenth century and one of the late seventeenth agreed with one of the 
thirteenth ignores the very different economic realities in which their 
thinking took place. 
 
In the end, one is left wishing that Kerridge had opened up the scope a bit 
more and used his great learning to engage the debate over evolving credit 
practices and their relation to ideas about money, credit, and sin in Early 
Modern England. 
 
Norman Jones is the author of several books including _God and the 
Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England_ (1989), and _The 
English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation_ (2002). 
 
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