While premodern economic history remains a thriving field in the United Kingdom and Europe, with many dedicated conferences and working groups, it has gradually been relegated to the margins of medieval studies in North America. The last decade, however, has seen a resurgence of interest in the field among graduate students and early career scholars, in keeping with broader scholarly trends (especially post-2008) in the history of capitalism and the political economy of past societies. This three-part session is therefore an effort to bring together—for the first time in recent memory—a broad cross-section of scholars working in this field, in the hope of catalyzing conversations and future intellectual and institutional collaborations.

Each of the three sessions in this multi-session strand addresses a major theme in medieval European and Mediterranean economic history. This panel rethinks medieval finance by embedding credit, banking, and auditing within cultural norms, political conflict, and institutional practice. A study of Genoa’s long-term communal debt challenges narratives that attribute its endurance to capitalist self-interest, instead highlighting patrimonial property logics, family strategies, and moral expectations that sustained markets for public debt. A second paper situates the fifteenth-century monti di pietà within the politics of Italian state expansion, showing how charitable pawn banks functioned not only as financial institutions but also as sites of popular resistance to territorial powers. A third contribution examines financial literacy in late medieval London by tracing auditors and audit practices at London Bridge House, using prosopography to reconstruct the skills, networks, and civic authority underpinning urban accountability. Together, these papers present finance not as an abstract system of markets and instruments, but as a set of socially embedded practices shaped by property regimes, religious ideals, and civic governance.