The first half of this chapter explores three ways in which modernist writers responded to the economics of their period. It explores modernism’s engagement with the economic horizons of writing and publication; modernism’s understanding of economic thought, ranging across of the ideas of figures such as John Maynard Keynes, Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille; and modernism’s responses to shifts in the money form itself, particularly changing attitudes towards the gold standard. The second half of the chapter explores the ways in which these issues were navigated in the work of modernist woman writers, including Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. In revealing and rewriting the relationship between metaphors of femininity and metaphors of money, these writers were able to explore and reimagine the relationship between their own sexual identities and consumer culture; the meanings of race, paternity, and inheritance; and the possibilities of exchange, translation, and a new international order.

The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Eleonore Stump and her friend and former teacher Norman Kretzmann († 1998), appeared almost thirty years ago. In the time since the publication of that volume, an enormous amount of research on Aquinas’s thought has appeared. The time is right, then, for a redoing of that Companion volume. But because so much time has elapsed since the first Companion volume appeared, it was not feasible just to revise it and reissue it as a second edition. Instead, it was necessary to start over completely. With the exception of Eleonore Stump, all the contributors to The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas are new and have written original papers for this volume; and even Stump’s paper in the first Companion volume has been replaced by an entirely fresh essay.

This chapter compares two generations of economic literary critics who, since the mid-1990s, have examined how literary texts intersect with racial capitalism. Like the authors they study, these scholars are less concerned with documenting the material consequences of racism than they are with interrogating the systemic logic of the sociocultural frameworks through which racialization is reproduced and racist policy is rationalized. The chapter specifically outlines the intersecting methodologies of these scholars and documents their efforts to show how literary texts often engage the language and logic of economic theory in ways that can destabilize racism’s ideological underpinnings. Beginning with the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s and ending with the emerging paradigm of the Economic Humanities, this chapter demonstrates that while the latter may better attend to the disciplinary specifics of economics than the former, it, like its predecessor, has yet to contend fully with the whiteness of the economic imaginary it takes as its subject.

When it comes to God’s creation of and interaction with the universe, it has sometimes been suggested that Christian revelation tells us nothing about the world and its origins, restricting itself to questions of value and not to matters of fact.1 Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, argued that a false account of creation implies false opinions about God.2 Aquinas consistently held that there were a number of truths about the creation of the universe that are central to Christian revelation: first, the truth that the world causally depends on God for its existence and all of its operations. Given the way in which Aquinas conceives of this dependence, this first truth implies that the universe is guided by God’s intelligent ordering or providence. The second truth is that God created the world with no constraints of any kind, including the necessity of creating from pre-existing matter, the necessity of employing causal intermediaries, or a necessity imposed by his reasons (such that he was not free to do otherwise). The third is that the universe was created in time: that is, having a definite beginning in the finite past. Of these three central truths about creation, Aquinas held that only the third is a revealed truth strictly inaccessible to human philosophical discovery, whereas the first and second are truths for which we can give conclusive, independent philosophical demonstrations even though they are also taught by Scripture. Beginning with his theological motivations, I will explain Aquinas’s commitments in regard to God’s creation, the universe’s dependence upon God, and its beginning in time.

This chapter examines the role of imagination in enabling economic actors to make sense of the world and decide how to act and the part played by metaphorical thinking and analytical imagination within the discipline of economics. It starts from the assumption that modern capitalism is a quintessentially creative and imaginative system, characterized by constant novelty and radical uncertainty. The authors argue that economic behavior is therefore necessarily guided by working fictions and, in particular, by fictional expectations that combine individual imaginaries and social narratives with calculation. Building on insights from literary theory, the chapter examines the structuring and performative role of narratives and models and concludes that market power rests with those able to make their narratives and imaginaries count. Championing a new form of narrative economics, the authors propose that economists should employ discourse analysis to read the contingent interpretations that economic actors use to navigate uncertain futures.

The changing structures of what we would now think of as “the economy” during the Middle Ages (c. 450 – c. 1500) left deep and extensive marks on the period’s writing and storytelling. Significantly, this was due to the presence of at least two economic systems developing in parallel: an agrarian-based manorial system and a cash-based commercial system. The chance survival of texts from this period does not provide a unified vision of economics throughout England or even from every century of the medieval period. What texts do survive, however, show us that economics in the literature takes many forms beyond simply the exchange of money for goods and services, the establishment of credit and banking, and the development of complex and varied trade networks. It also appears in how a household is run, in gift-exchange, and even in the language of reckoning of sins with punishment or penance.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.

Freedom is, without a doubt, an important component of Aquinas’s worldview. The drama of salvation, in which humans respond to God’s offer to redeem them from sin and give them everlasting happiness, would make no sense if humans were not free.1 But commentators have found it difficult to agree on the details of Aquinas’s views.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas posited three virtues of the speculative intellect: science, wisdom, and understanding. Aquinas’s accounts of the virtues of science and wisdom have received a great deal of attention, as has his notion of intellectual virtue in general. But understanding as an intellectual virtue has received almost no attention at all. Part of the difficulty stems from Aquinas himself: Aquinas uses intellectus broadly, and typically without specifying whether he means to refer to our natural habitual knowledge of first principles, the act of understanding, or a developed virtue. At the same time, however, Aquinas clearly considers the virtue of understanding to be both important in its own right and fundamental to the virtues of science and wisdom. This chapter seeks to examine understanding as an intellectual virtue in Aquinas and to propose a hypothesis about what, given Aquinas’s account, it would mean to develop the intellectual virtue of understanding. I will argue that Aquinas’s account implies that we can develop the virtue of understanding only insofar as we can come to increase what we habitually know and thereby pave the way for our understanding to operate more readily and more effectively. In this way, the virtue of understanding is importantly different from the other intellectual virtues.

The doctrine of the transcendentals is a truly medieval doctrine. Up until the thirteenth century, philosophers and theologians were familiar with the study of being through the ancient philosophers and their schools, particularly Plato and Aristotle. What was important for Plato, Aristotle et al. was to offer an account of being in terms of those constitutive principles without which nothing would be. So, for example, being was taken to be accounted for in terms of participation in the forms (Plato), or through the dichotomies of substance and accident, matter and form, act and potency (Aristotle). What such projects seemed to exclude, or at least did not address explicitly, was the character of being itself. The question of the character of being itself was not explicitly elaborated until the thirteenth century, when the chancellor of the University of Paris, Philip, produced his Summa de bono (1225–8), the first eleven questions of which elaborate the doctrine of the transcendentals or what he called the communissima. Philip was quickly followed in this project by the Franciscans at the University of Paris, notably Alexander of Hales, whose Summa theologica or Summa fratris Alexandri (1245) contained a treatise on the transcendentals in Book 1.

World-systems analyses emerged in the 1970s as attempts to fuse a Marxist-informed critique of developmental economics with historical sociology. They are best known through the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), but benefit from multiple others who have contributed to and expanded the topics of interest for the world-systems knowledge movement. This chapter highlights some of the main concerns of world-systems and illustrates their relevance for literary and cultural studies of economics, society, the State, and cultural production. World-systems analyses began as alternatives to forms of developmental and stage theories, both Keynesian-oriented economics in the post-war period, and within post-Russian Revolution Marxism. As a moral protest against the capitalist world-system, world-systems analyses also question the theoretical and epistemological frameworks developed within the modern research university.

This chapter examines how aspects of post-capitalism have been imagined by speculative fiction, with some emphasis on utopian and dystopian fiction. There are some methodological issues around the best way to read speculative fiction in relation to post-capitalism. One influential distinction is between “blueprint” utopias and “critical” utopias. Blueprint utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), are held to offer rigidly instrumental plans for reorganizing society. Critical utopias, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), supposedly destabilize deeply-rooted assumptions, freeing readers to explore possible economic forms that appear neither in reality nor fiction. However, this chapter emphasises that the distinction between blueprint and critical utopias is a blurred one. It further suggests that instrumentalizing interpretations of speculative fiction are part of its status as culture, rather than a mere misuse of speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction critically and creatively, including attention to its instrumentalities, may help to transform what constitutes the field of “the economic” in the first place, and enrich our understanding both of capitalism and its alternatives. However, already existing practices of the more-than-capitalist world often far exceed what speculative fiction has been capable of imagining.

Toward the end of his life, Aquinas delivered a series of catechetical talks in the vernacular on the Apostles’ Creed to an Italian audience, which were preserved in Latin by his secretary, Reginald of Piperno. Its eschatological themes, including the resurrection, would have been of huge importance to Aquinas’s audience.1 His exposition shows his commitment in faith to the future resurrection of all the dead for judgment, and to an eternal reward bestowed on those who die in a state of grace and an eternal punishment for those who die in sin. In our own times there has been widespread theological debate over whether an eternal hell will ever be populated, especially in view of those passages in Scripture that suggest a renewal of creation. In Aquinas’s time and place there was no such controversy about hell. But while the beatitude of heaven enjoyed priority over hell in his theological thinking, with infernal punishment understood to consist primarily in the eternal loss of the beatific vision, fundamental to each was the bodily resurrection common to both the blessed and the wretched.