Over the past few decades, the interest of numerous historians has been roused by the subject of guilds, due to their widespread distribution, the way they were founded, and how they functioned. For a long time scholars wavered between two opposing views. The first, based on legal premises, held that guilds acted as an essential intermediary. Their purpose was to represent and mediate in the pre-industrial era, a period when the norm was to bargain with a collective service in exchange for a collective privilege. The second, which can be defined broadly as laissez-faire, viewed guilds as institutions with monopolistic tendencies, inflexible and ill-suited to economic development, and which acted as a brake on any form of innovation. 1 Obviously, two such highly ideological positions were often purely theoretical, idealistic, and anti-historical, and failed to take account of the real economic impact of guilds. Despite that, until recently those views constituted mainstream scholarship, until growing dissatisfaction on the part of various scholars inaugurated a new phase of studies on a European scale. So, at last, the complexity of the guild system has been reappraised and its links with economic cycles have been re-evaluated and the limits inherent in a purely internal study have been overcome. Convictions which were deeply rooted, but not necessarily firmly grounded, have been discredited. 2 1. An excellent synthesis is to be found in Philippe Minard, ''Le Corporazioni e il mondo del lavoro'', in Valerio Castronovo (ed.), Storia dell'economia mondiale, II, Dalle scoperte geografiche alla crescita degli scambi (Rome, 1997), pp. 399-411. 2. This new approach to guilds is particularly evident in S.R. Epstein et al. (eds), Guilds, Economy and Society (Madrid, 1998), which contains the proceedings of Session B1 of the XIIth World Economic History Congress. Among the most recent works the following should be mentioned:
