Arthur Ness writes: > I once looked > into the price of high quality paper in 16th century Augsburg, paper of the > kind one would use to copy lute music. A ream of folio sized paper (about > 9x12) in Augsburg cost the equivalent of a kitchen servant's monthly > salary. Today a ream of highest quality paper could be bought with three > hour's work by a dishwasher. I don't doubt the numbers, and I'm not surprised to learn that paper is cheaper now than it was then, but it would be a big mistake (as Ahnold would say) to simply do the arithmetic and conclude that paper in 16th-century Augsburg was about 500 times as expensive as it is now.
I'm speculating here, but I think kitchen servants (and servants in general) got paid very little money, both because there was more supply than demand for their work (household service was considered a very good job since it was less physically arduous, and a social step up for the people in the labor pool) and because, if I'm not mistaken, the bulk of their compensation was room and board. In the more upscale establishments, the lord of the manor would probably have supplied clothes as well. So Arthur, with his usual scholarly knack for approaching an answer by figuring out how to ask the question, gives us the price of paper in what appears to be equivalent currencies: kitchen labor then and now. But if what I said above is correct, they are more apples and oranges than equivalents because the economic systems the exemplify are so different, and can only serve as one broad parameter, as Arthur acknowledges. >I should also have checked the price of other >items in daily use, such as a loaf of bread. . . . and then tried to figure out whether bread was relatively more or less expensive then, which would probably involve consideration of how the compensation of farmers, millers, teamsters and bakers made then compares with what they make now. You could make a life's work out of this stuff. If you throw enough numbers into the pot and figure out how to weight them, eventually you may come up with a ballpark sort of historical Dow Jones Industrial Average. BTW, the Dow, which is an attempt to represent the average price of publicly traded corporate stock in America by taking an average of representative large companies, periodically changes the companies included in the average to reflect shifts in the how the country does business--for example, deleting a heavy manufacturer and adding a software company. If the economic indicators in one country can lose relevance in a matter of decades, imagine trying to adjust for centuries in which the middle class rose, the aristocracy declined, farm economies became industrial, and vast areas of enterprise were socialized. Re Arthur's point about manuscripts: Vivaldi, after publishing a six-work or 12-work opus every two years on average between 1705 and 1729, stopped publishing his music (opus 13 and 14, which came after 1729, are thought to be spurious collections put out to capitalize on the Vivaldi name). It's commonly said (though I don't know where the conclusion comes from) that he stopped publishing because it interfered with the lucrative prices he could command for manuscripts. HP
