Abstract
In this introduction, I outline the historical and theoretical reasons why gender played such a central role in medieval notions of economy and value, and what is lost in our understanding of these realms if that role is occluded. Gender ideology provided late medieval writers and thinkers with a ready vocabulary for articulating their fears and fantasies about money and shifting notions about value. Gender’s role in the conceptualization of economy was obscured during the Enlightenment with the invention of political economy, an event that segregated issues of economics from other realms, such as gender. The result is that noneconomic realms seem disinterested, although they are not. Studying the gender of economy through the lens of medieval literature not only helps us to better understand late medieval culture, it also helps us to understand the shadowy prehistory of economy and recognize the ways in which gender ideology continues to inform current views of money and value today.
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Notes
- 1.
FDCH E-Media, Inc., “Remarks by California Gov. Schwarzenegger to the National Republican Convention,” Washington Post, August 31, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50470-2004Aug31.html (accessed September 4, 2018).
- 2.
For a discussion of this phrase in popular culture, see Edwin Battistella, “Girly Men and Girly Girls,” American Speech 81, no. 1 (2006): 100–10. Despite the passage of time, the phrase still retains currency. In 2014, Australian Finance Minister Mathias Cormann declared that the Labor Party’s Bill Shorten was an “economic girlie man.” Australian Associated Press, the Guardian, October 17, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/oct/18/mathias-cormann-calls-bill-shorten-an-economic-girlie-man (accessed September 4, 2018).
- 3.
On the late Middle Ages as a time of anxiety , see William J. Bouwsma, “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 215–46.
- 4.
Jim L. Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy: 973–1489 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 23–7.
- 5.
On the increasing importance of money in the late Middle Ages and the developments that contributed to it, see John Day, The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Peter Spufford’s Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and his Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003); Diana Wood, Medieval Money Matters (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004); and Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy.
- 6.
Many of the issues that I sketch here, such as anxieties around the instability of money, worries about the debasement of currency, and concerns about money’s facilitation of social movement , will be discussed more fully in the next chapter.
- 7.
See, for example, Roger A. Ladd’s Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Craig E. Bertolet’s Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013); Jonathan Hsy’s Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013); Michael Murrin’s Trade and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Walter Wadiak’s Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017); Robert Epstein’s Chaucer’s Gifts: Exchange and Value in the Canterbury Tales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018); and the recent collection of essays Money, Commerce, and Economics in Medieval English Literature, ed. Craig E. Bertolet and Robert Epstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- 8.
The scholarship on women and economy is extensive, and what follows is not meant to be a comprehensive list of sources, but rather some studies that I have found particularly useful in shaping my understanding of English women’s economic experiences. Those studies include Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-industrial England (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Barbara Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law and Economy in Late Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); the essays collected in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Theresa Earenfight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Sally Livingston, Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); the influential work of Judith Bennett on women’s labor, especially Chapter 5 of History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and, co-authored with Maryanne Kowaleski, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years After Marian K. Dale,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 2 (1989): 474–501. See also several of the essays in Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras’s The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), including Kathryn Reyerson’s “Urban Economies” (295–310); Jane Whittle’s “Rural Economies” (311–26); and Joanna Drell’s “Aristocratic Economies” (327–42). Particularly illuminating is Martha Howell’s “Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism” (561–76), which argues that the transformation of gender roles helps to rehabilitate commerce in the late Middle Ages, specifically by assigning production (money making) to men and consumption (spending money) to women.
- 9.
On the absence of attention to gender in new economic criticism , see The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. In this collection of fourteen essays, only one essay focuses on a pre-Enlightenment author (Michel de Montaigne), and none of the essays treat the Middle Ages.
- 10.
James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 15–22.
- 11.
Thompson, Models of Value, 22.
- 12.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John E. Richardson, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 242.
- 13.
William Langland, Piers Plowman : The C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994), 2.80–96. For a discussion of this moment in Piers Plowman and what it suggests about the synergies among money, language, and sexuality, see Diane Cady, “Symbolic Economies,” in Middle English: Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 124–41, at 135–6.
- 14.
See Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), especially Goux’s chapter on “Sexual Difference and History,” 213–44. I will take up the implications of Goux’s claims on our understanding of medieval discussions of economy in Chapter 2.
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Cady, D. (2019). Introduction: Anxious Interests. In: The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26261-7_1
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