The Voice of the Hammer. The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature by Nicola Masciandaro (review)

REVIEWS 256 cated but always provided the glue for fractures along lines of exchange. When Smith finally returned to England for good, Indian war parties took full advantage of the opportunity, and their initial antagonism met with open and violent military action by Lord De La Warr in an ensuing series of conflicts. By then, however, a foothold had been established, and the problematic history of Jamestown and its consequences for Native Americans was up and running, even though its ultimate success was at this time uncertain. Ultimately, Mallios provides an interesting study of the importance put on mediums of exchange in the initial contact period of what would become American history, and no doubt his research will serve as a jumping-off point for future scholars of colonial Virginia and the Carolinas. That being said, this reader left the book not without a few reservations. Recent work by scholars that Mallios cites, James Axtell and Karen Kupperman chief among them, has sought to understand the fluidities and contingencies of cultural boundaries across initial lines of contact between settlers and native populations, while still preserving the mandate to focus on “indigenous cultural systems and agency” (3). In The Deadly Politics of Giving, however, the rigidity of not only the methods of exchange but of race and culture in general remain absolute throughout the book. Very rarely are the different attitudes toward exchange tied into other realms of thought and experience within the respective cultures, perhaps unnecessarily isolating an economic activity from its social, cultural, and intellectual context (which must surely be of interest to any anthropologist as well as any historian). Similarly, while Mallios wants to place the exchanges he studies “on a continuum of reciprocal exchange” between the opposite poles of gift and commodity, throughout the book the picture one gets is less of a spectrum or continuum than one opposed to the other. In a telling aside, Mallios cites The Possessive Investment in Whiteness by George Lipsitz, a book chiefly on the continuation of subtle ideologies of white supremacy in today’s mainstream discourse of identity politics, as evidence that the ideology of whiteness “creates a system of advantage that mandates the subordination of nonwhites” (5). This has perhaps been true throughout United States history, but it is unclear how settled such an ideology was in the late sixteenth century for Spanish and English settlers, and the citation of Lipsitz here is anachronistic. Indeed, the assumption of an absolute, fixed separation of white and non-white, Western and Non-Western, commodity and noncommodity exchange, etc., dominates an otherwise excellent study, foreclosing for the author any historical investigations into the cracks and fissures along lines of contact and conquest. MATTHEW E. CROW, History, UCLA Nicola Masciandaro, The Voice of the Hammer. The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2007) 209 pp. In his introduction to The Voice of the Hammer, Nicola Masciandaro commences with a poetic example of work’s portrayal in Middle English literature from the alliterative poem Complaint against Blacksmiths: “Swarte smekyd smeÞes smateryd with smoke/ Dryue me to deth with den of here dyntes./ Swech noys on nyghtes ne herd men neuer:/ What knauene cry, and clateryng REVIEWS 257 of knockes!” This beginning signals a comparative treatment of productivity within the manual-physical act of work and the productivity of poetic activity itself as a means of commenting on physical labor. Masciandaro’s critical attempt to give voice not only to a contemporaneous understanding of medieval economic history in the form of physical work, but also to its reflection in Middle English literature as a valid and yet ambiguous category of human experience , is an ambitious one. While acknowledging the ideological power with which the Marxian paradigm concerning the power of labor as an alienating force, separating the worker-subject from his immediate context of work, holds sway in our modern age, Masciandaro asserts carefully the different approach to late medieval treatments of work, plotting the fruitful results of poetic activity on the subject of physical work as a means of enunciating human experience. Masciandaro divides his book into three long chapters which expose the various dimensions...