Dark age economics : a new audit / Richard Hodges.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 139-155) and index.

The debate -- 'Forget the Trobriand Islands, the Kula Ring"?: models for early medieval economics -- A golden age of peasantry: the 'original affluent society'? -- Shrine franchises: monastic cities and the transformation of the European economy -- Debating the history of 'mushroom cities' -- Audit: the 'hypostatic union of idea and material.'

"In Dark age economics: a new audit, Richard Hodges reviews and enlarges upon the debate that his ground-breaking Dark age economics: the origins of towns and trade launched thirty years ago. Special attention is given to new archaeological evidence for managing agrarian economies and how this shaped the evolution of the earliest medieval urban communities. Ranging across western Europe, with an emphasis upon the role of the Church as an agent of change, Professor Hodges advances a new thesis about the shift from the consumption economies of Antiquity to the emphasis on production in the Middle Ages"--Page 4 of cover.