"The late sixteenth-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default"--Jacket, p. [2].