Introduction to Genovese Sermon by Albertano da Brescia

The careful study made by the late Professor Oscar Nuccio of ancient, preclassical economic thought has clear title to a place among the most significant works that have tackled the debate on the origins of the spirit of capitalism and on the developmental role of the civil jurists of the Low Middle Ages in the formation of the social sciences. Economic science belongs to the family of social sciences and went through the same travails and important events that contributed to their evolution. Albertanus was a jurisconsul from Brescia who lived an intense intellectual and political life in Italy in the first half of the thirteenth century. Nuccio makes a point of informing the reader that the emphasis placed on an author far removed from us is not meant to tout the presence, during the Middle Ages, of a complete system of scientific theories that could lay out the complexity of social and natural phenomena. In this case, the task of the historian is to underline the possibility of grasping, even in the epoch in which Albertanus worked, the signs of an era in profound transformation in which conscience and individual interests were changing radically