Romancing capital: The gift in Middle English literature

Description

This dissertation reads Middle English romance as an exploration of late-medieval capitalist emergence. While criticism of these romances has typically focused on their assertion of feudal ideology, I argue that in one respect—their focus on giving and spending—the English romances offer a sustained critique of this ideology in light of economic change. I read romances from the early-thirteenth-century King Horn through Chaucer as reflecting new ideas about generosity that arise from the decline of giving as a form of payment for military service. Building on Marcel Mauss's classic analysis of the gift as part of a cycle of exchange, I argue that the detachment of largesse from its traditional place in the feudal economy is paradoxically what allows the gift in the late Middle Ages to be reimagined as a pure expression of disinterest—as it is in the so-called "Spendthrift Knight" romances of the fourteenth century, in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and in the romance-inspired stories of generous and noble outlaws that begin to appear at the close of the Middle Ages. Eschewing the strict reciprocity inscribed in the feudal practice of largesse, Middle English romances embrace exalted fantasies of giving in and for itself, often to the point of disrupting the feudal order they seem to endorse. In so doing, these texts exemplify what the Marxist historian Michael Nerlich has called the broader "dialectical process of making courtly literature or ideology bourgeois and making the rising bourgeoisie courtly." As fictions that explore the mutually informing relationship between traditional chivalric ideals and capitalist economics, Middle English romances thus mark an important moment in the formation of modern ideas about literary value, charity, consumption, and an array of related practices and ideals that together constitute a major aspect of the historical legacy of the medieval period.