Volume 36, Number 21 · January 18, 1990
Shylock Without Usury
By Garry Wills
Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society
by Joseph Shatzmiller
University of California Press, 255 pp., $35.00
God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England
by Norman Jones
Basil Blackwell, 217 pp., $49.95
The Merchant of Venice
a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Hall
Early in 1317, a Marseilles court heard the case of a Jewish moneylender named Bondavid of Draguignan. His accuser, Laurentius Girardi, claimed to have paid back sixty shillings borrowed of the Jew, though Bondavid still had the bond in his possession and was still trying to collect on it. 'A Shylock,' we have assumed on good evidence, could expect little mercy in a Christian court. Yet Joseph Shatzmiller accomplishes here what Carlo Ginzburg has done with particular trials for heresy and witchcraft—he uses a single legal process to pry open a partly hidden world.[1]
Review, 3194 words
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