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Chaucer's Gifts

Chaucer's Gifts

Robert Epstein

(2018)

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Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world or in his poem. Chaucer’s Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer’s Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable – an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer’s world or our own.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover\r Front Cover
Series Page\r ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page\r iv
Dedication\r v
Contents vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction:\r Chaucer’s Commodities, Chaucer’s Gifts 1
1. The Franklin's Potlatch and the Plowman's Creed: The Gift in the General Prologue 15
2. The Lack of Interest in the Shipman’s Tale:Chaucer and the Social Theory of the Gift 43
3. Giving Evil: Excess and Equivalence in the Fabliau 67
4. The Exchange of Women and the Gender of the Gift 97
5. Sacred Commerce: Clerics, Money and the Economy of Salvation\r 143
6. ‘Fy on a thousand pound! ’: Debt and the Possibility of Generosity in the Franklin’s Tale 171
Conclusion 197
Notes 203
Bibliography 229
Index\r 243
Back Cover\r Back Cover