ABSTRACT
The need to distinguish financial value from other kinds of value appears to have taken on a pressing urgency in English during the fifteenth century. Precapitalist and transitional societies usually focus upon the value of value. Indeed, in such societies, value often seems to wear itself on its face, as in the magnificent, bejeweled reliquary of St. Foy at Conques. Value is unashamedly materialized. But, in medieval Europe, these aristocratic materializations had to confront a contradictory system of valuation: that of Christianity. Christianity became, the normative religion of Western Europe, supported, with whatever resistances and contradictions, by the state. But, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed, it emerged as a slave religion. Its valuations were consequently bizarre from the perspective of aristocratic materializations. Christianity developed its own powerful economics, not only through the modernizing work regimes of the monasteries but also through the cult of relics. Capitalism, that is, draws upon the metaphorics of Christianity but it is antithetical to incarnational theology.
