Abstract
This collection represents the burgeoning interest in money, markets, and economics in medieval English literature. The introductory opening chapter establishes the social and theoretical contexts. The social conditions include changes in climate, politics, demography, and commerce that caused major disruptions of social structures in the late Middle Ages. The theoretical contexts reveal medieval literary criticism returning to economic and monetary matters as central themes in the wake of New Historicism’s emphasis on power discourses as an alternative to Marxist historiography. The ensuing chapters find the writers of fourteenth-century England working to understand the commercial economy, in which money is both a means of exchange and a commodity, innovative economic practices challenge traditional social relations, and the culture of gift-exchange persists alongside the cash nexus.
Greet prees at market maketh dere ware,
And to greet cheep is holde at litel prys.
Chaucer ( 1899 ), The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 522–3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Of course, money and economics were never absent from medieval criticism . See, for instance , Shell (1978), Shoaf (1983), Vance (1986). But whereas Woodmansee and Osteen, among others, depicted New Historicism as an alternative to Post-Structuralism and the other theoretical models that had dominated criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, these medieval studies were applications of theory, and were interested in money as a system of representation analogous to language and literature.
Works Cited
Bertolet, Craig E. 2013. Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London. Farnham: Ashgate.
Bolton, J. L. 2012. Money in the Medieval English Economy: 973–1489. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Campbell, Bruce M. S. 2017. The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1899. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. W.W. Skeat. Vol 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farber, Lianna. 2006. An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gastle, Brian W. 2004. “‘As If She Were Single’: Working Wives and the Late Medieval English Femme Sole,” in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England. Ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel. New York: Palgrave. 41–64.
Holsinger, Bruce, and Ethan Knapp. 2004. “The Marxist Premodern.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34: 463–71.
Howell, Martha C. 2010. Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaye, Joel. 1998. Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ladd, Roger A. 2010. Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature. New York: Palgrave.
Patterson, Lee. 1987. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Patterson, Lee. 1991. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Picketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shell, Marc. 1978. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shoaf, R. A. 1983. Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry. Norman: Pilgrim Books.
Smith, D. Vance. 2003. Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vance, Eugene. 1986. Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen, eds. 1999. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. New York: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bertolet, C.E., Epstein, R. (2018). Introduction: “Greet prees at Market”—Money Matters in Medieval English Literature. 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_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71900-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71899-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71900-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)