Speaker
Description
During the last decades the term 'monetisation' has increasingly been used in Scandinavian studies on coinage, money and its use, and economy in the Middle Ages. And yet, the term remains somewhat obscure, its definition largely idiosyncratic . In this paper I explore the question of 'when was monetisation achieved?'. The answer to the question may differ considerably depending on the approach.
Analyses of the size of coin production and availability of cash in different parts of society tend to address issues such as where the coins were in use, for what purposes, and how we understand monetisation as concepts, both medieval and modern. A central feature was the widespread use of commodities as means of payment and standard values. The level of coin use in comparison to other means of payment provides an important dimension of monetisation seldom considered in studies which use numismatics as a starting point.
