was ‘‘unnatural.’’ By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Christian thinking deemed poverty a positive virtue, culminating in the creation of mendicant (begging) orders like the Franciscans who initially tried to live in absolute poverty. These attitudes toward charging interest and the virtues of poverty lingered long in the Western Christian world. The audience for this book is not easily discernable. As a synthetic work Le Goff openly leans heavily on the works of others, to whom he lavishly, repeatedly offers credit. He seems stuck in a historiographical time warp, however, because this book, published originally in French in 2010, relies to a surprising degree on works thirty years and older. Marc Bloch, who died in 1944, is referenced multiple times as if his works were published this decade, not decades ago (pp. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 45, 54, 70, 84, 149). Seminal works by Peter Spufford, Lester K. Little, and others make repeated appearances in Le Goff’s chapters, mentioned on subsequent occasions as if they had not been discussed before. The specialist looking for a new spin or interpretation from a history mandarin will not find it here. Students or those simply curious about how people used and thought about money in the Middle Ages will find the book’s short chapters easy to read but Le Goff could not decide if he wanted it to be narrative or topical and therefore did neither definitively. Even though it breaks little new ground, this is a useful, broad survey that offers a clear picture of why the medieval world was so different than our own in its approach to money. In that sense Le Goff accomplishes what historians ought to be doing with their subjects: understanding them on their own terms rather than ours. That medieval people failed to practice capitalism as it is now under- stood was not really a failing; rather, the conditions needed for a modern attitude toward capital did not exist. Laurence W. Marvin Berry College Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World, by Brent D. Shaw. The Robson Classical Lectures. Toronto, Ontario, University of Toronto Press, 2013. xx, 456 pp. $90.00 (cloth). A new book by one of the foremost specialists in Roman North African history, a Canadian no less, is always a special event. But as Brent Shaw himself surpris- ingly concedes in the introduction, ‘‘this is not a book’’ (p. xv). He prefers the labels ‘‘reflection of a series of oral presentations’’ (p. xv), ‘‘experimental sortie,’’ and ‘‘initial test probes’’ (p. xvii). Indeed, while the first three chapters focus on reaping and are well connected to each other, the last two branch out on meta- phors, without much by way of explanation on how these link together. The lack Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 49, spring-summer/printemps-e ´te ´, 2014 83