CHAPTER TWO

RECOVERING UNNOTICED IDEAS:

ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
OF BERNARDO DAVANZATI’S
LEZIONE DELLE MONETE1

STEFANO ADAMO
UNIVERSITY OF BANJA LUKA

Introduction
John Toland’s English translation of Bernardo Davanzati’s Lezione delle
monete (1588), entitled A Discourse upon Coins, was published in 1696.
The first Italian monographic edition of the same work would not appear
until 1988. Bernardo Davanzati delivered his essay at a conference held at
the Accademia Fiorentina. Not surprisingly, the text is erudite and
stylistically elegant, two qualities that most Italian commentators in the
following centuries never fell short of recognizing at the expense of
Davanzati’s intuitions in monetary matters.2 That content, however, did not
escape the late seventeenth-century English readers of the Lezione, as is
clearly shown by the English version of the essay. The historical context
that made the Lezione relevant to English readers helps explain that different

1I jotted down the first ideas about this paper while in residence at the International
Centre for Economic Research, Turin, in 2013. I would like to thank the ICER
director, Enrico Colombatto, for his constant intellectual stimulation and for
providing excellent conditions to carry out research, and Giovanni Pavanelli for the
lively conversations on the history of economic thought that inspired the project. I
am also very grateful to Charles Larkin for sharing with me the published version of
his study on Charles Davenant and the Great Recoinage, and to Tatjana Marjanović
for linguistic advice.
2 Sergio Ricossa, “Introduzione”, in Lezione delle monete e notizia de’ cambj, a cura

di Sergio Ricossa (Torino: Fògola, 1988), 9-19.

48 Chapter Two

sensitivity. In the mid-1690s, the poor state of the silver coins in circulation
had prompted the government to replace the old coins with newly minted
ones. This generated a debate over what should be the value of the new
coins, and Davanzati’s short essay was translated by John Toland as a
contribution to that debate. The present essay tells the story of how a poorly
appreciated Italian economic text ended up becoming a landmark in the
history of economic thought thanks to a political debate occurring in a
different country over more than one hundred years after its appearance.
This chapter is divided as follows. The first section contains a summary
of the publication history of the Lezione delle monete. The second and third
sections present an analysis of the Italian and English texts respectively. The
fourth section reconstructs the terms of the recoinage debate. The final
section shows the affinities between the monetary thought of Bernardo
Davanzati and that of John Locke, who played a major role in the recoinage
debate. The essay ends with some concluding remarks.

A curious publication history

The publication history of the Italian text does not reflect its reputation as a
landmark of early-modern monetary theory3. After it was presented by
Davanzati himself at the Accademia Fiorentina in 1588, there is no sign of
publication for another fifty years, when it appeared as an addendum to a
miscellaneous collection of Davanzati’s works entitled Scisma d’Inghilterra
con altre operette.4 This edition was reprinted in Padua in 1727 without

3 Cosimo Perrotta, “Davanzati, Bernardo”, Treccani Online, accessed November 8,

2016, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bernardo-davanzati_%28Il-Contributo-
italiano-alla-storia-del-Pensiero:-Economia%29/; Arthur Eli Monroe, Monetary
Theory before Adam Smith (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1923);
Peter Groenewegen, “Davanzati, Bernardo”, in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of
Economics, eds. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (London:
Macmillan, 1987), 747-48. Monroe mentions Davanzati in the title of the chapter
devoted to early mercantilism; Peter Groenewegen calls the Lezione “one of the
earliest presentations of the metallist view of the origin and nature of money” (ibid,
747).
4 Bernardo Davanzati, Scisma d'Inghilterra con altre operette del sig. Bernardo

Dauanzati al serenissimo Ferdinando Secondo Gran Duca di Toscana (Firenze:

Nuova Stamperia del Massi e Landi, 1638). That this was the first printed edition of
the Lezione is attested by Le Branchu and Bindi. See Jean-Yves Le Branchu, “La
leçon des monnaies: Notice et note”, in Écrits notables sur la monnaie, XVIe siècle,
de Copernic a Davanzati: reproduits, traduits, d’après les éditions originales et les
manuscrits, avec une introduction, des notices et des notes, dir. Jean-Yves Le
 Recovering Unnoticed Ideas: Davanzati’s Lezione delle monete 49

modifications.5 The Lezione reappeared in 1729 in a miscellany of Florentine

papers entitled Prose fiorentine raccolte dallo Smarrito, (pseudo)
accademico della crusca, a collection of letters and lectures by notable
Florentines from the preceding two centuries.6 In 1752, erudite Filippo
Argelati included the Lezione in an anthology of Italian monetary treatises
in four volumes, claiming to have edited it on the basis of an autograph
copy. However, Argelati’s editing presents many inaccuracies in its para-
textual apparatus, which is based on a series of annotations by philologist
Anton Maria Salvini and, allegedly, Davanzati himself. At the end of one of
the main passages of the text, for example, there is a footnote that quotes a
passage from a book by German writer Jacob Bornitz, first published in
1608.7 The footnote is attributed to Davanzati himself who, however, died
in 1606, two years before the publication of that book which, therefore, he
could never have seen in print. Following a remark by Enrico Bindi, the
origin of this mistake may be traced back to Salvini’s own philological
work. In his bibliography, Bindi reports that the Marucelliana library in
Florence owns a manuscript copy of the Lezione delle monete within a
miscellaneous code of Salvini’s writings. The text is annotated with a series
of quotations from authorities intended to support the theses of the Lezione.
Salvini’s notes appear on pages of their own. However, the small volume
also contains margin notes that a third party must have attributed to
Davanzati, because the hand that wrote Davanzati’s initial below those
notes is neither Salvini’s nor the main text writer’s. Pietro Custodi, the
editor of the fifty-volume series Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia
Politica (1803-1816), did not amend all of Argelati’s mistakes despite
claiming otherwise.8

Branchu (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1934); Bernardo Davanzati, Le opere di Bernardo

Davanzati, 2 voll., a cura di Enrico M. Bindi (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1853).
5 Bernardo Davanzati, Scisma d'Inghilterra con altre operette del signor Bernardo

Davanzati Bostichi, gentiluomo fiorentino (Padova: Giuseppe Comino, 1727).

6 Smarrito [pseud.], a cura di, Prose fiorentine: Raccolte dallo Smarrito [pseud.]

accademico della Crusca (Firenze: Stamperia di S. A. R., per Santi Franchi, 1729).
According to Enrico Michelangelo Bindi, the editor of the nineteenth-century
collection of Davanzati’s complete works, this is a reliable edition which was also
used by lexicographers. However, the front matter of the 1727 Comino edition says
the same thing as the 1638 edition. See Davanzati, Le opere di Bernardo Davanzati,
LVIII.
7 The book in question is Jakob Bornitz, De nummis in repub. percutiendis &

conservandis no. 372 (Hanoviæ: Typis Wechelianis apud Claudium Marnium &
heredes Ioannis Aubrii, 1608).
8 Bernardo Davanzati, “Lezione delle monete”, in Scrittori classici italiani di

economia politica, a cura di Pietro Custodi (Milano: Destefanis, 1804), 2.

50 Chapter Two

No “clean” edition of the Lezione went through the printing press until
1852-53, when Bindi published the collected works of Davanzati in two
volumes with a carefully edited text cleared of inaccurate footnotes.9 It was
only 136 years later, in 1988, that Sergio Ricossa edited the first and only
Italian book edition of Davanzati’s two economic essays with the title
Lezione delle monete e Notizia de’ Cambj. The book was published in fine
paperback by the small, family-owned, Turinese publishing house Fògola,
and is only available as a remainder today.10
Not surprisingly, this rather slipshod publication history is accompanied
by philological confusion. As hinted above, some footnotes were long
misattributed; though eventually erased from the Bindi edition, they are still
present in Ricossa’s edition, which reproduces Custodi’s footnotes of 1806.
In the Palgrave Dictionary of Political Economy, Maffeo Pantaleoni wrongly
dated the Lezione delle monete to 1582.11 Possibly as a consequence of that
typo, the essay appears misdated in a number of major scholarly works, such
as Arthur E. Monroe’s Monetary Theory Before Adam Smith,12 and P. H.
Kelly’s introductory essay to Locke on Money.13
One further mistake that is relevant to the present paper is the one made
by Sergio Ricossa, who misdates the English translation of the Lezione to
1646, when John Toland, the translator, was not even born. In fact, had the
translation been released in 1646, it would have been a far less interesting
event than it actually is. John Toland translated Davanzati’s Lezione delle
monete as a single pamphlet with the title A Discourse upon Coins in 1696.
The year is crucial because it coincides with an important currency crisis in
British history, which spurred a heated intellectual debate that would lead
to what has come to be known as the “Great Recoinage”. The decision to
re-coin most of Britain’s silver coins has acquired great significance in
hindsight because it became a first step toward the affirmation of the British
Gold Standard, the monetary system of industrial Britain that would last
until 1931.14 Before telling the story of this translation, however, an

9 Davanzati, Le opere di Bernardo Davanzati.

10 Bernardo Davanzati, Lezione delle monete e notizia de' cambj, a cura di Sergio
Ricossa.
11 Maffeo Pantaleoni, “Davanzati, Bernardo”, in Dictionary of Political Economy,

vol. 1, ed. Robert H. Inglis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1894-1899), 1: 482–83.

12 Monroe, Monetary Theory before Adam Smith.
13 Patrick H. Kelly, “General Introduction,” in Locke on Money, ed. Patrick H. Kelly,

2 vols., The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991).
14 Charles J. Larkin, “The Great Recoinage of 1696: Charles Davenant and Monetary

Theory,” in Money and Political Economy in the Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey,
 Recovering Unnoticed Ideas: Davanzati’s Lezione delle monete 51

overview of the Lezione delle monete is in order. Unless otherwise stated,

throughout the essay all quotations from Davanzati will be followed by
Toland’s translation.

The Lezione delle monete

The Lezione delle Monete15 is a lecture of approximately 25 pages on the
origin, value, use and misuse of money as it was conceived of at the time,
i.e., as coins of precious metals—generally gold and silver—also known as
specie. The essay is written as an almost uninterrupted succession of
sentences, but can be roughly divided into three parts. In the first one,
Davanzati reconstructs the history of money using a wealth of references
and quotations from the classics; in the second, he gives his definition of
money expounding what he believes to be the essence of it; in the third, he
explains the uses of money delving into price formation and the value of
economic goods. More to the point, the last part also contains a heated
warning against tampering with the metal content of the coins, whether on
the part of private citizens or by the issuing authorities. It is this last part
that would turn out to be most relevant in England one century later.
After reviewing a series of old-time stories regarding the first instances
of coinage, Davanzati defines the essence of money as follows:

Moneta è oro, ariento, o rame coniato dal pubblico a piacimento, fatto dalle
genti pregio e misura delle cose per contrattarle agevolmente.

(Money therefore is Gold, Silver or Copper coined by publick Authority at

pleasure, and by the Consent of Nations made the Price and Measure of
things, to contract them the more easily).16

In other words, Davanzati describes money as a medium of exchange

coined by public authority out of three metals that were selected over time
by the people for their ability to facilitate trade.17 His conception of money
is therefore that of a medium of exchange that people agree upon in a

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 5 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,

2014), 84.
15 Bernardo Davanzati, “Lezione delle monete”, in Lezione delle monete e notizia

de’ cambj, a cura di Sergio Ricossa, based on the Massi and Landi ed. of 1638.
16 Davanzati, “Lezione delle monete”, 44; A Discourse upon Coins, 12.
17 This is more clearly expressed in Notizia de’ cambi, where Davanzati explains

that these three metals were chosen because they are “metalli più nobili e portabili,
contenenti in poca massa molta valuta”. See Bernardo Davanzati, “Notizia de’
cambi”, in Lezione delle monete e notizia de’ cambj, a cura di Sergio Ricossa, 68.