Full Description
This is the first collection of essays dedicated to the topics of money and economics in the English literature of the late Middle Ages. These essays explore ways that late medieval economic thought informs contemporary English texts and apply modern modes of economic analysis to medieval literature. In so doing, they read the importance and influence of historical records of practices as aids to contextualizing these texts. They also apply recent modes of economic history as a means to understand the questions the texts ask about economics, trade, and money. Collectively, these papers argue that both medieval and modern economic thought are key to valuable historical contextualization of medieval literary texts, but that this criticism can be advanced only if we also recognize the specificity of the economic and social conditions of late-medieval England.
Contents
1 Introduction: "Greet press at market": Money Matters in Late Medieval English Literature.- 2 Judas and the Economics of Salvation in Medieval English Literature.- 3 "Whoso wele schal wyn, a wastour moste he fynde": Inter-reliant Economies and Social Capital in Wynnere and Wastoure.- 4 "The ryche man hatz more nede thanne the pore": Economics and Dependence in Dives and Pauper.- 5 Summoning Hunger: Polanyi, Piers Plowman, and the Labor Market.- 6 Demonic Ambiguity: Debt in the Friar-Summoner Sequence.- 7 Death is Money: Buying Trouble with the Pardoner.- 8: My Purse and My Person: "The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse" and the Gender of Money.- 9 The Need for Economy: Poetic Identity and Trade in Gower's Confessio Amantis.- 10: "Money Earned; Money Won": The Problem of Labor Pricing in Gower's "Tale of the King and the Steward's Wife".- 11 Crossing the Threshold: Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, and the Liminal Transactionalism of the Later Middle Ages.
