Usury is a concept often associated more with religiously based financial ethics, whether Christian or Islamic, than with the secular world of contemporary finance. The problem is compounded by a tendency to interpret riba, prohibited within Islam, as both usury and interest, without adequately distinguishing these concepts. This paper argues that in Christian tradition usury has always evoked the notion of money demanded in excess of what is owed on a loan, disrupting a relationship of equality between people, whereas interest was seen as referring to just compensation to the lender. Although it is often claimed that hostility towards ‘usury’ has been in retreat in the West since the protestant Reformation, we would argue that the crucial break came not with Calvin, but with Jeremy Bentham, whose critique of the arguments of Adam Smith, upholding the reasonableness of the laws against usury, led to the abolition of the usury laws in England in 1854. There has to be a role for law, whether Islamic or secular, in regulating financial relationships. We argue that by retrieving the necessary distinction between demanding usury as illegitimate predatory lending and interest as legitimate compensation, we can discover common ground behind the driving principles of financial ethics within both Islamic and Christian tradition that may still be of relevance today. By re-examining past ethical discussions of the distinction between usury and just compensation, we argue that the world’s religious traditions can make significant contributions to contemporary debate. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007usury, Interest, Bible, Islamic finance, middle ages, predatory lending, religion, financial ethics,

Liturgists and Dance in the Twelfth Century: The Witness of John Beleth and Sicard of Cremona 1 CONSTANT J. MEWS D ANCING is not often associated with Christian liturgy, at least in modern experience. Yet according to the Mitralis de Officio of Sicard, bishop of Cremona (1185 -1215), composed about 1200, the circular dance (chorea) provides a key metaphor for understanding the liturgy of Easter. 2 Sicard here draws together two earlier discussions of the subject, both from the twelfth century and of enormously wide influence, manifesting a more positive attitude toward dance than found in many early medieval commentators on the liturgy: the Gemma animae (Jewel of the soul) of Honorius Augustodunensis, composed for a monastic audience in the early twelfth century, probably in Germany, and the De ecclesiasticis officiis of John Beleth, a secular cleric writing probably in Paris circa 1150-1160. 3 While many scholars have observed the renewal of interest in the pagan authors within a literary context in the twelfth century, the witness of liturgical commentaries from the period has been little noticed. Sicard implies that the festivities of the pagan Saturnalia and its associated freedom 1 I am indebted to Dawn McGann for originally awakening my interest in liturgical dance, and am grateful to Donnalee Dox, Bruce Holsinger, and many others for discussing issues and translations in this paper.Constant J. Mews is professor of history and director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology at Monash University, Australia.

Images of Abelard and Heloise. This chapter discusses images of Abelard and Heloise from the 12th to the 20th centuries. It observes how the controversial character of their relationship, as well as accusations of heresy made by St. Bernard have created stereotyped images of Abelard and Heloise as rebels against authority and the religious life that do not do full justice to their intellectual achievement. They were not lovers, but thinkers.

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From Scivias to the Liber Divinorum Operum:Hildegard's Apocalyptic Imagination and the Call to Reform This paper considers Hildegard's use of apocalyptic imagery so as to elucidate her attitude to the cause of reform, in particular the question of whether she espouses fundamentally traditional attitudes to the social order (as for Haverkamp and Flanagan) or whether she is a radical apocalyptic preacher (as for Kerby-Fulton). I argue that although admirers like Gabeno of Eberbach culled ideas from her later visionary writing that reinforce an image of Hildegard as developing a radical vision of history, Hildegard's original apocalyptic vision (as articulated in Scivias) offers a call to moral rather than institutional reform. After she left Disibodenberg, she became more interested in the destiny of humanity as a whole than with ecclesia as an institutional structure. Her call to reform, however, is first of all presented in terms of the restoration of health to the body and as a general lament of worldliness and greed in the church, rather than as a vision of historical change.