A Pre-Protestant Ethic?

This week Stuart Henderson of Queen's University Centre for Economic History published a nice piece on the NEP-HIS blog, in which he comments on the paper Roos van Oosten and I wrote entitled 'Breaking the piggy bank. What can historical and archaeological sources tell us about medieval saving behaviour?'.

Henderson's contribution, which includes a summary of our arguments, can be read here on the NEP-HIS blog. I am grateful for Stuart Henderson’s careful reading of our paper and helpful comments

Below, I briefly comment on three issues:

1: Stuart Henderson asks whether it is possible ‘to identify if households were more likely Protestant or Catholic’. Considering that our savings dataset for Edam covers 1462-1563, and comes from before the introduction of baptismal, marriage, and death records in Holland, this would be quite difficult. We do know, however, that Edam witnessed a relatively early rise of dissenters going against the Church of Rome, starting already in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although we can only guess how widespread such ideas were, it seems safe to say that some form of ‘Protestantism ‘ was present in our final sample year, 1563.

2. In our analysis we use economic and social developments to explain the decline in saving behaviour after c. 1600. We suggest that a lower standard of living is likely to have made small-time saving more difficult, and that at the same time mandatory saving schemes of craft guilds may have provided an alternative for saving using piggy banks. When we suggest “that the true champions of saving behaviour were the late-medieval adherents to the Church of Rome, and not the Protestants that gradually emerged in sixteenth‑century Holland”, we refer to these economic and social developments. Perhaps Protestants were more prone to saving than Catholics, but their relative low standard of living, and participation in craft guilds’ mandatory saving schemes would have made this difficult. Admittedly, this does not completely rule out a Protestant ethic, but it does cast serious doubt on its effect in historical reality.

3. Stuart Henderson wonders to what degree possibilities to invest in financial markets provided alternatives for saving using piggy banks? We would be inclined to think that small-time saving and investments in financial markets were no substitutes, but rather complementaries. To invest in a financial instrument required at least 10 guilders (more than a month’s wages) and usually much more: this was the threshold for participating in financial markets. We believe there may have been a trajectory going from small-time saving, to investments in financial instruments once an individual had sufficient savings: the piggy bank then functioned as a means to arrive at the threshold of financial market participation – but then the two would be complementary rather than substitutes.

I agree that there are still questions open for discussion: investigating the development of a Protestant ethic during the Reformation is quite difficult. Yet, I believe we have demonstrated that it is not at all impossible, and hope to have contributed to the discussion on the relation between religion and economy.