Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late 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.

Medieval English devotional literature holds out two models of salvation to audiences, each echoing a different form of economic organization. The first, based on the manorial economy, applies the ethics of stewardship to the afterlife. The second, based on the commercial relationships of the marketplace, positions the sinner and God as equivalent parties in a business deal, with salvation as a bargain to be won from God through shrewd negotiation. This chapter explores how the figure of Judas mediates these contradictory messages in Middle English drama and poetry. It studies the cycle dramas, the gospel harmony The Southern Passion, and the anonymous ballad “Judas,” and it concludes with observations on the echoes of Judas in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Dives and Pauper, an early fifteenth-century dialogue between a wealthy layperson and a poor wanderer, is intensely concerned with the ways in which economic activities both tie society together and create imaginary divisions. This chapter situates the author’s analysis of economic and social privilege within the larger context of Franciscan theological and philosophical explorations of ownership and economics. While the ideas in Dives and Pauper contain the potential for radical social change, its author repeatedly stops short of advancing political solutions for his audience. Instead, his focus is on changing his audience’s mental orientation toward his or her social position.

Chaucer’s The Friar’s and The Summoner’s Tales turn on the notion of settling one’s accounts in this life to ensure one’s reward in the next. Critics have tended to focus on the distinction between material and spiritual economies: the Friar and Summoner falsely quantify what is unquantifiable, reifying spiritual truths and elevating gross matter. This chapter, however, argues that the tales expose what Walter Benjamin calls the “demonic ambiguity” inherent in Western concepts of owing and paying. Applying the economic theology of Benjamin and Agamben, the chapter reads the corruption of the Friar and the Summoner as the “signature” of the divine economy. This Chaucerian satire is relevant for the contemporary project of economic theology, both its redefinition of secularization and its critique of capitalism.

Criticism of The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale has focused on the Pardoner’s complicated identity and his rhetorical agenda, but the image of the murder itself was evocative for Chaucer’s audience, as illustrated by an early fifteenth-century wooden chest panel featuring the murder scene. This chapter analyzes The Pardoner’s Tale in the context of the late medieval discourse of death and money, to reconcile the directly antimoney ars moriendi of Chaucer’s Pardoner with the much more ambivalent attitude toward trade and commerce that Chaucer displays elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner’s transparent profit motive, his Tale’s deployment of a traditional suspicion of money, and the apparent resonance of this story for Chaucer’s audience reveal the deep ambivalence of the late Middle Ages toward money and economy.

This chapter explores the ways that fiscal, gendered, and sexual anxieties merge in “Chaucer’s Complaint to his Purse.” Chaucer imagines his purse with two bodies: a female lover who is spending with others what she should keep for Chaucer alone, and as his own body, the masculine integrity of which is threatened by his current fiscal situation. The first section of this chapter seeks to explain why a poem on monetary need is framed in somatic terms, and what this idiom tells us about medieval fears and fantasies regarding money and its intersections with gender ideology. The second section examines how the history of critical inquiry on this poem focuses on Chaucer’s fiscal health and his political allegiances in ways that replicate the investments in value and masculine integrity that I outline in this chapter.

This chapter considers the economic elements of Chaucer’s thought as revealed through his poetry in relation to the medievalism inherent in the foundational economic writings of Adam Smith. The chapter advances the notion of “liminal transactionalism” to describe an economic outlook and set of practices merging gift-exchange with commerce, a mode of thinking and practice that obtained from the later Middle Ages well into the early Modern period, and in which Chaucer’s and Smith’s thought, while significantly distinct, can both be located. To explore their different positions on this spectrum, the chapter addresses first the satirical dimensions of Smith’s view of the decline of “feudalism.” It then analyzes how the elements that Smith picks out in that decline—especially the over-emphasis on personal prestige by lords, and the growth of more independent practical strategies by those who served them—featured in late medieval English poetry, especially Chaucer’s. Finally, the chapter argues that the Smithian elements of Chaucer’s thought do not fully amount to a Smithian “classical” economic model, but that Smith himself retains elements of a Chaucerian or late-medieval combination of ways of defining economic value.