nces, were never rejected. The study of the writers of this
period is therefore the study of an organic whole, the germ of which
is to be found in the writings of Aquinas.[3]
[Footnote 1: Ingram, _op. cit._, p. 35.]
[Footnote 2: _Op. cit._, vol. i. pt. ii. p. 382.]
[Footnote 3: The volume of literature which bears more or less on
economic matters dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is
colossal. By far the best account of it is to be found in Endemann's
_Studien in der Romanisch-canonistischen Wirthschafts- und
Rechtslehre_, vol. i. pp. 25 _et seq_. Many of the more important
works written during the period are reprinted in the _Tractatus
Universi Juris_, vols. vi. and vii. The appendix to the first chapter
of Reseller's _Geschichte_ also contains a valuable account of certain
typical writers, especially of Langenstein and Henricus de Hoyta.
Brants gives a useful bibliographical list of both mediaeval and modern
authorities in the second chapter of his _Theories economiques aux
xiii^{e} et xiv^{e} siecles_. Those who desire further information
about any particular writer of the period will find it in Stintzing,
_Literaturgeschichte des roem. Rechts_, or in Chevallier's _Repertoire
historique des Sources du moyen age; Bio-bibliographie_. The
authorship of the treatise _De Regimine Principum_, from which we
shall frequently quote, often attributed to Aquinas, is very doubtful.
The most probable opinion is that the first book and the first three
chapters of the second are by Aquinas, and the remainder by another
writer. (See Franck, _Reformateurs et Publicistes_, vol. i. p. 83.)]
Sec. 3. _Teaching_.
We shall confine our attention in this essay to the economic teaching
of the Middle Ages, and shall not deal with the actual practice of the
period. It may be objected that a study of the former without a study
of the latter is futile and useless; that the economic teaching of a
period can only be satisfactorily learnt from a study of its actual
economic institutions and customs; and that the scholastic teaching
was nothing but a casuistical attempt to reconcile the early Christian
dogmas with the ever-widening exigencies of real life. Endemann, for
instance, devotes a great part of his invaluable books on the subject
to demonstrating how impracticable the canonist teaching was when it
was applied to real life, and recounting the casuistical devices that
were resorted to in order to reconcile the teach
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