The Introduction defines debt as a financial tool and as a theological concept, summarizing the role of debt in the late medieval English economy and in the sacrament of penance. This dual definition challenges the “separate spheres” interpretive paradigm that dominates literary history. A paradigm in which economics and theology are constitutive of two ideally separate modes, this dominant interpretive approach frames the shift from feudalism to capitalism as a shift from the traditional bonds of hierarchy and communalism to modern individualism and competitive acquisition. Understanding capitalism as an economy of debt makes possible a new perspective on economic change in late medieval England, one that revises Weber’s spirit of capitalism and challenges Weberian periodisation. The image of God as a bookkeeper and the concomitant understanding of sin as a debt that cannot be fully discharged is first elaborated and disseminated en masse in the late medieval flowering of vernacular literature in England and in Europe. This, I argue, is the cultural site where the systematization of the ethical conduct of life is imagined for the first time not only as a possibility for all people, but as a requirement.

This essay approaches the vernacular style of Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum (c. 1379) through his Dominican order’s preoccupation with a properly calibrated preacher’s style. Good preachers must strike a balance to communicate their learning, but never obscurely; to speak plainly but not without grace. Thomas Waleys called this mode a grossus stilus, a simple style, and this is an aptly gross name for Daniel’s way with Middle English, as he instructs his readers in the medieval art of inspecting urine for medical diagnosis. I contextualise Daniel’s own stylistic programme (as articulated in theory in his prologue and then proved in practice in the rest of the Liber) within a long tradition of literary theorising around jargon and plain speech found across the rhetorical manuals and guides to preaching of the Dominican curriculum. While they expressed their arguments in Latin, these texts offered a theory of vernacular eloquence that – as the Liber would prove – could circulate amongst the apparently disparate fields of preaching and Middle English medicine.

Dante’s Comedy is a work of theology, done by way of a fictional journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Did Dante really make that journey? Of course he did. The journey is made by way of the fictional narrative describing it, and this way of enacting a truth by way of its description shares something with the sacramental act that makes to be so that which it signifies, or perhaps better, in the sort of way that the interpretation of Scripture is part of the efficacy of the scriptural word. Dante needed poetry to record that journey, and the poetry was how he traveled. In this way his poetry is a lived interpretation of a Christian journey, and the journey recorded is the journey made.