Monetae cudendae ratio

Copernicus' earliest draft of his essay in 1517 was entitled "De aestimatione monetae" ("On the Value of Coin").

[3] For the 1528 Prussian Diet, Copernicus wrote an expanded version of this paper, "Monetae cudendae ratio", setting forth a general theory of money.

Like many later classical economists of the 18th and 19th centuries, he focused on the connection between increased money supply and inflation.

[6] "Monetae cudendae ratio" also draws a distinction between the use value and exchange value of commodities, anticipating by some 250 years the use of these concepts by Adam Smith—although it, too, had antecedents in earlier writers, including Aristotle.

Copernicus' essay was republished in 1816 in the Polish capital, Warsaw, as Dissertatio de optima monetae cudendae ratione (Dissertation on the Optimal Minting of Coin), few copies of which survive.