The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature. By Richard Newhauser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 246.

Communis opinio held that avaritia was not an issue in the early Middle Ages (p. xiii) but, rather, accompanied the rise of a mercantile economy in the eleventh century. But men have always striven to retain and to acquire, and moralists have always inveighed against avarice. Newhauser provides an "early history of greed." Its focus is not the instantiation of the sin or the social emotion, but the pathology of avarice as seen by those Christian authors with some systematizing interest in the matter. A very clear offshoot of the author's generically focused The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (1993), this book combines moments and authors, treated by picture-painting, with argumentation about general trends and significant departures. The subtitle is misleading: most of the book is devoted to Late Antiquity.

Danuta Shanzer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign