Crossing the Threshold: Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, and the Liminal Transactionalism of the Later Middle Ages

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.