| This project examines how three Middle English texts---the poem Pearl, the long prose treatise Dives and Pauper, and The Book of Margery Kempe---use the language of gift-giving to imagine alternatives to the competitive cultures of English court and marketplace during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I argue that early capitalism is only one of several modes of exchange available to late medieval writers, along with the gift-economy (first theorized by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss) and forms of mercantile exchange inflected by local markets and cultures of credit. The medieval writers considered in this project understand gift exchanges as creating relationships of loyalty, hierarchy, and mutual dependence. While two of the authors under consideration welcome such relationships as potentially fostering reconciliation between individuals and God, or individuals and each other, the third, Margery Kempe, sees divine gift-giving as a release from a hostile and oppressive mercantile culture. I argue that the use of these categories by Middle English writers enriches our understanding of economics through the possibility of exchanges informed not by self-interested competition but by generosity and reciprocity. |
