| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Suzanne Gay. The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2001. Pp. 301. $29.95.
The familiar portrait of medieval Japan leads to two widely held convictions: first, that it was wholly a time and place of warriors, warfare, and competing warlords; and, second, that its history is a quaintly antiquarian subject of minimal pertinence to modern scholars. Suzanne Gay's long-awaited new monograph adroitly exorcises both stereotypes.	1
Focusing on commerce in the imperial and shogunal capital city of Kyoto, Gay reveals a startlingly modern world of competing—and overlapping—authorities, negotiated economic relationships, and a commerce-spawned middle class emerging at the nexus of it all. Her moneylenders are a far cry from the usurious loan sharks preying on the impoverished and desperate of popular imagination. They are bankers and social leaders, whose clients included aristocrats, clerics, warriors, wealthy merchants, and craftsmen. "People of all classes," she observes, "borrowed money by custom, by necessity, or by a combination of both. Living on credit ... was a way of life in medieval Kyoto" (p. 49).	. . .

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