Money and the Man: Economics and Identity in Late Medieval
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MONEY AND THE MAN: ECONOMICS AND IDENTITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Kimberly Ann Thompson, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2007 Dissertation Committee Approved by Dr. Lisa Kiser, Adviser Dr. Ethan Knapp ________________________ Dr. Karen Winstead Adviser English Graduate Program ABSTRACT In “Money and the Man: Economics and Identity in Late Medieval English Literature,” I explore the relationship between the profound economic changes of the late medieval period and shifting models of subjectivity. I argue that often-noted economic transformations, such as the expansion of the money economy, the commercialization of English society, and the general increase in personal wealth, had consequences far beyond the marketplace. Indeed, such changes had a significant impact on how people imagined themselves and others to be defined, causing a shift from societal models of birth and function to paradigms emphasizing economic activity and income. Increasingly, I suggest, being was related to having. Further, I posit that these changes were awkwardly embraced, generating widespread yet local anxieties among various groups, such as the gentry, the religious, and the merchant class. It is the work of this dissertation to explore a group of texts—romances, saint’s lives, and ballads—which chronicle the struggle to formulate meaningful identities in a society in flux. ii Mil gracias a mi esposo, Cesar. Sin ti, este documento no podría existir. ii i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee as a whole for the innumerable suggestions and the unflagging support they offered to me during this process. More specifically, I would like to thank each of them individually for their various contributions to the project. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Lisa Kiser, my adviser and the chair of my committee, for her incisive close readings of many drafts, her unfailing enthusiasm for the topic (again, after many drafts), and her personal support for me during this project as well as my graduate career as a whole. I want to thank Dr. Ethan Knapp not only for his ability to always push me to think beyond the parameters that I have set for myself, but also for his incredible intellectual generosity, which benefited this project more than he can know. Finally, I want to thank Dr. Karen Winstead for her insightful and rigorous readings of the following chapters, which have made this dissertation immeasurably better and my own thinking immeasurably sharper. Any errors that remain are solely my own. As everyone knows, dissertations do not get written without the support of a non- academic network as well, and my deepest gratitude goes to my family, who has aided me in this endeavor even when it caused me to be an absentee spouse, parent, and daughter. Thanks to Linda Thompson, Cesar Macuare, Valeria, Samantha, and Cesar Tomas. iv VITA July 20, 1970.................................................Born, Cincinnati, Ohio 1993...............................................................B.A. English, University of Cincinnati 1995...............................................................M.A. English, The Ohio State University Starting 2007..................................................Assistant Professor, Clayton State University 2005-2007......................................................Visiting Faculty, Wittenberg University 2001-2004......................................................Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract………………………………………………………………………....................ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv Vita…………………………………………………………………………………….......v List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………….....vii Chapters: Introduction: Of Money, Men, and Late Medieval Social Change………………..1 1. Knights and Merchants Part One: Sir Amadace, Magic Economics, and Chivalric Identity…………………………………………………………………………...12 2. Knights and Merchants Part Two: Narrative Structure and Class Politics in the Middle English Octavian Romances……………………………………………..72 3. The Eye of a Needle: St. Alexius and Poverty as a Language of Power……….118 4. The Late Medieval Robin Hood Ballads: Radical Economics Revisited………181 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………227 v i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: St. Alexius, rood screen from Holy Trinity (Torbryan, Devon) Figure 2: St. Alexius, detail vi i INTRODUCTION Of Money, Men, and Late Medieval Social Change Yt ys all wayes sene now a days That money makythe the man. -from the 15th c. Reg. MS 17B XLVII There are key moments in literary history that attract the attention of scholars not simply because they coincide with the production of great works or the lives of great writers but because they represent a paradigm shift, a real break with what has gone before. The late medieval period in England, a period characterized by sustained military conflict, plague, famine, and financial crises, is just such a moment. A complex series of social and economic changes—“the decline of serfdom, the demise of feudalism, and major progress towards capitalism” (Hatcher and Bailey 106)—was taking place, changes that necessarily affected the ways in which medieval subjects understood themselves, their place in society, and their relationships to each other. Indeed, my dissertation argues that one of these changes, the rise of a commercial economy in late medieval England, had profound and far-reaching effects on identity, as subjects scrambled to revise their notions of money and its relation to selfhood. 1 In the last twenty years, there has been a veritable explosion of studies that make an argument for the emergence of commercialization in medieval England. First, there have been recent authoritative investigations of the increasing monetization of the late medieval English economy. Despite early skeptics, such as M.M. Postan, who derides the use of “the rise of a money economy” as a deus ex machina (123), there is clear evidence of a discernible rise in a money economy in England by the end of the thirteenth century (Bolton 12 and Britnell “The Uses of Money” 17).1 As Peter Spufford cogently puts it, this was a “transition to an economy in which money was the measure of all things” (Money and its Use 243). This rise of a money economy was, of course, not an isolated incident, as James Bolton rightly notes that a money economy needs more than money (4). In addition to an increase in amount and circulation, there must be “parallel developments in law and legislation, in literacy and numeracy, and within the economy itself in terms of growth in population and in the number of markets and fairs” (Bolton 5- 6). This monetization, then, went hand in hand with the overall commercialization of the medieval economy, a phenomenon that has by now been well established.2 Richard Britnell argues that England became a highly commercialized society during the 1 For history of money use in England, see Diana Wood, ed., Medieval Money Matters (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004); John Chown, A History of Money: From AD 800 (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986); and Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988). 2 For arguments on commercialization, see Richard H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993); Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005); Richard H. Britnell and Bruce M. S. Campbell, eds., A Commercialising Economy: England 1086-c. 1300 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995); Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Towns, Commerce, and Crafts, 1086-1348 (London: Longman, 1995); and Jennifer Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley, and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 2 thirteenth century, a trend that did not subside even with the economic recessions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Other studies have shown that “England in the High Middle Ages…possessed thriving industries, towns, and trades which offered substantial scope for employment, specialization, and the enhancement of the productivity of labour” (Hatcher and Bailey 129). While not a full-fledged capitalist economy, “the profound changes between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries” (An Age of Transition 43) were clearly moving in that direction. Today, many medieval economic historians feel confident that “few would now doubt the pervasive influence of money and monetary equivalences, or the impact of the market” (Galloway 23). To be sure, there were surges and declines in this commercialization process, but the ultimate outcome was the establishment of a market-centered economy that endured through the end of the middle ages and set the stage for the later commercial revolutions of English society. While important, these structural shifts in the medieval economy are only a preliminary to the real heart of my discussion, which centers around the consequences these often-noted economic transformations had beyond the marketplace. That is, the institution of money as a measure of value for all things and the predominance of exchange relationships had more far-reaching effects than the commutation