Periculum and peritia: aesthetics and affects in the medieval 'ars market'

This essay examines several textual accounts of the late medieval “ars market,” the commercial context of selling and buying artfully made objects in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. Ranging from a magisterial work of pastoral theology, to legal ordonnances and reglemens for crafts, to a scholastic econmium to Paris, the textual sources discussed reveal how the expertise of artists and artisans and the captivating, persuasive force of works of ars were both valued and scrutinized in the later Middle Ages. Although they were written for dissimilar purposes and different audiences, the texts examined nonetheless understand the late medieval ars market as a forum in which the mingling of artistic expertise, aesthetic allure, fraud, risk, and credulity posed considerable challenges to human judgment.