1. Introduction: “Greet prees at Market”—Money Matters in Medieval English Literature

This collection represents the burgeoning interest in money, markets, and economics in medieval English literature. The introductory opening chapter establishes the social and theoretical contexts. The social conditions include changes in climate, politics, demography, and commerce that caused major disruptions of social structures in the late Middle Ages. The theoretical contexts reveal medieval literary criticism returning to economic and monetary matters as central themes in the wake of New Historicism’s emphasis on power discourses as an alternative to Marxist historiography. The ensuing chapters find the writers of fourteenth-century England working to understand the commercial economy, in which money is both a means of exchange and a commodity, innovative economic practices challenge traditional social relations, and the culture of gift-exchange persists alongside the cash nexus.