ABSTRACT
The form of wealth that revolutionized medieval Europe and is at the heart of the discursive histories studied here was what contemporaries called, in common speech and law alike, movables. From the beginning of European culture, the rich had stored wealth in plate and jewels, sometimes a great deal of it, and every class possessed such wealth in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and bedding, animals and equipment, all of which was movable in the most basic sense, physically transportable from one place to another. Medieval property law also allowed for property that was movable, and most customs and codes privileged these goods in certain ways by allowing them to be transferred more widely by gift than was the case with immovable property, permitted them even to exit the kin network. Legal terminology's inadequacy in the face of property's mutation was just one manifestation of the discursive crisis produced by commercialization.
