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A new era in the study of guilds
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
That has provided an opportunity for new investigation, and in many cases there has been a real shift in points of view, true certainly of the significance now attributed to the frequent and protracted contracts that characterized guilds in various towns. Traditionally they were considered a sign of all-out defence of privileges which had become anachronistic and were the main reason for the bankruptcy of many guilds, but now contracts are being noted once more for their significance as providing opportunities to negotiate and define rules between guilds operating in the same field.3
Other researchers have highlighted the radical change of views regarding the central theme of the relationship between guilds and technical progress in manufacturing. There has been a move away from the view that guilds were entrenched in the defence of their own privileges and so were extremely hostile to change or...