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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2023
The manuscripts dealing with commercial practices in Europe from the thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries have been the subject of numerous studies by those interested in the history of mathematics and sociology of knowledge. Indeed, these manuscripts shed a great deal of light on how modern mathematics, as well as mechanistic naturalism of the Enlightenment, can be traced to commercial arithmetic of the medieval and Renaissance periods. As such, the recent interest in these early manuscripts is well understood. But there is another aspect of these writings that has received far less attention: the economic contents of these manuscripts and their implications. for economic theory. In what follows, I will attempt to remedy this shortcoming by looking at the monetary lessons of these manuscripts concerning barter.