From Sin to Capitalism: Jacques Le Goff on Usury in the Middle Ages

Article excerpt

Jacques Le Goff's 1986 book *Your Money or Your Life* still stands as essential reading on how medieval Christianity grappled with lending money at interest. For centuries, the Catholic Church condemned usury as a mortal sin, a prohibition that shaped everything from banking practices to theological debates about the soul's worth. Le Goff's work traces how this religious framework gradually cracked, creating the intellectual space for modern capitalism to emerge. Nearly four decades later, historians still cite the book when explaining how economic systems are built on moral foundations, and how those foundations can shift.