The book aims at a readership of both economists and historians. Beyond the well-known Weberian thesis concerning the role of Protestantism in the development of capitalism, monastic economies are studied to assess their impact on the religious patterns of economic behavior. Those issues are discussed in the frame of key economic concepts such as rationality, state intervention, networking, agency, and governance. The book includes essays concerning Byzantine, Ottoman and modern South-Eastern Europe, and early modern Western Europe. Survival and continuity of the monastic wealth is considered as an example of successful handling of real estate transactions, flows of funds, and contacts with financial institutions. Moreover, the book focuses on the economic impact of the privileged relations of monasticism with the secular powers. Finally, the question is raised how the monastic economy (still) matters in the contemporary world.
Table of contents
Introduction
R. Avramov et al. Does monastic economy matter?
I. Wealth management: Real estate
D. Kalpakis. Beyond the borders: The vital space of Byzantine Athos. A geographical overview of the Athonite estates up to the Ottoman conquest
S. Lepida. Transactional activity of Kykkos Monastery (Cyprus) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Real estate contacts
P. Perluss. Urban catholic monasteries and urban growth in eighteenth-century European cities
II. Flow of funds and governance
A. Fotić. How to run a big monastic Çiftlik: The case of Hilandar’s Bulgar Metochion in Karviya (Kalamaria), sixteenth-seventeenth centuries
P. Kotzageorgis. Crisis and survival of the Athonite monasteries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
G. Lazăr. Between piety and economics: Nucet monastery (Wallachia) and its register of revenue and expenses (1731—1739)
K. Giakoumis. Monastic financial management in the provinces of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (1867—1873)
III. Dealing with finance
L. Cotovanu. Orthodox monasteries as banks: A comparison with Catholic mounts of Piety
A. Bouroutis. Assets, interest and national preferences: The Athonite monasteries and the Greek banks in the early twentieth century
B. Heffernan. Nuns’ funds: The 1874 and 1925 accounts of the Carmel of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands
IV. Vis-à-vis the secular power
E. Kolovos. Monasteries, economy and politics in the Orthodox World from Medieval to Modern Times
A. Roullet. The economics of patronage in Western Catholic nunneries (Sixteenth-Eighteenth century)
M. Michael. The church of Cyprus and the transition from Ottoman rule to British modernity
D. Kalkandjieva. The monastic economy of the Bulgarian Orthodox church between the Two World Wars
V. Contemporary monasticism
I. Depret. Female Orthodox monasticism, ecology and productivist capitalism: The case of the monasteries of Ormylia (Greece) and Solan (France), late twentienth — early twenty first century
I. Jonveaux. Does monastic economy still matter? The economy of Catholic monasteries and the expectations of society
