Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
For the first, see the important revision of Marxist and Smithian accounts of the fourteenth-century’s collapse of population, traditional trade routes, and focus and kind of imposed industrial improvements in Campbell (2016); for the second, see the more detailed study of specific versus broader economic changes in Dyer (2005). A stimulating inquiry into the limits and uses of various models and theories for accounting for why “the distinctive features of what is often termed the ‘feudal era’ evolve[d] and dissolve[d] when they did” is found in Hatcher and Bailey (2001).
- 2.
All citations from Smith (1976) will be in this form (including book and chapter for other editions).
- 3.
Simpson treats Renaissance figuring of the “middle ages” through John Leland and John Bale (2002, 7–32). On the notion of “mode,” which I invoke here as well, see Simpson’s rather defensive and negative remark from a quotation by Alastair Fowler: “modes have always an incomplete repertoire, a selection only of the corresponding kind’s features, and one from which overall external structure is absent” (67 n.80). In my usage here, I would more positively define “mode” as a recurrent and deeply habituated combination of values and institutionally enshrined practices.
- 4.
For the long tradition of making Chaucer the exceptional forerunner, see Simpson (2002, 45–50), with other references.
- 5.
The last point is Howell’s (2010, 261–302) not Dyer’s .
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
From Harbert (1975, 12–13).
- 9.
All citations of Gower (1900) are from this edition.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Citations are from Chaucer (1987).
- 13.
For comment on the importance of particularity in gift -exchange, versus the “denial of individuality” in market transactions, see Howell (2010, 180–1, 201).
- 14.
See Broughton (2005, 583–648), with a convenient chart of features of the different branches of the story (587–89).
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Galloway, A. (2018). Crossing the Threshold: Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, and the Liminal Transactionalism of the Later Middle Ages. In: Bertolet, C., Epstein, R. (eds) Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71900-9_11
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