The Business of Piety: Private Banking Activities of Female Religious Organisations in the Later Middle Ages
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In this post, Anna Molnar introduces their research, undertaken while an Economic History Society Power Fellow at King’s College London during the academic year 2024/2025.
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Early career fellowships often arrive at a moment when ideas are plentiful, but time and intellectual space are scarce. For me, the Economic History Society’s twelve‑month Power postdoctoral fellowship provided the crucial bridge between completing a PhD and securing a three‑year Early Career Fellowship. It allowed me to consolidate my doctoral research on women and finance in the late Middle Ages and to transform it into a new, ambitious project on female religious institutions as financial actors.
Recent digitisation and quantitative analysis of late medieval annuity contracts reveal a pattern that sits uneasily with established narratives of pre‑industrial finance. Across a handful of urban centres in Central Europe, convents appear not only as borrowers or recipients of endowments, but as repeat lenders issuing large volumes of long‑term credit. This finding suggests that female religious institutions occupied a structurally important position within private credit markets, one that has not yet been fully integrated into existing accounts of medieval banking and finance. What follows from this observation is not simply a need to add convents to an existing list of medieval lenders, but to reconsider how private credit markets functioned and how financial authority was constituted in the later Middle Ages. Rather than assuming that banking activity must take a particular organisational form, I focus on the functions identified in the primary sources: repeat lending, the mobilisation of pooled capital, risk management, and the provision of long‑term credit to urban economies.
The core empirical foundation of the project is a newly assembled dataset of private annuity contracts drawn from archival collections in Vienna and further urban centres in Central Europe, covering the period from the aftermath of the Black Death to the end of the fifteenth century. These contracts record the terms of long-term credit transactions, including nominal values, repayment obligations, collateral, and the identities of both lenders and borrowers. Read collectively, they make it possible to track changes in lending activity over time and to situate convents within the broader landscape of urban credit provision. By applying quantitative methods attentive to long-run change, the project examines structural shifts in the volume of lending, the size of transactions, and the cost of borrowing, and relates these to episodes of demographic, political, and economic disruption. This approach makes it possible to investigate whether convent lending expanded during periods of recovery, contracted during crisis, or adapted to changing levels of risk, thereby assessing the extent to which these institutions functioned as stabilising financial actors.
Alongside this quantitative analysis, the project employs close reading of contractual language by digital humanities methods to reconstruct borrower profiles and borrowing purposes. This qualitative dimension allows for a distinction between institutional and individual borrowers, and between credit used for religious expenditure and credit directed towards secular activity, such as household finance, trade, or urban property. Preliminary evidence suggests that female religious institutions provided capital to a socially broad set of borrowers and that a significant share of convent lending entered the urban economy outside strictly devotional contexts. Taken together, these findings challenge assumptions about the separation of religious and economic spheres in the later Middle Ages and point instead to forms of institutional overlap that were central to the functioning of private credit markets.
The development of this project was directly shaped by the twelve-month postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Economic History Society. Initially intended to support the publication of an article, the fellowship created the conditions necessary to identify a larger intervention emerging from the archival material. It provided the time to refine methods, to scale up data collection, and to situate the findings within wider debates about credit, trust, and institutions in the long run. On this basis, the project places female religious institutions at the centre of pre‑industrial finance, revising how we understand the organisation of credit markets and the distribution of economic authority in the centuries following the Black Death.
To contact the author:
Anna Molnár
University of Reading
