Poverty, Property, and the Self in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Chaucer’s Griselda

In Dante’s Inferno, Cantos 24 and 25, the thieves, those who robbed others of their property, are punished by the loss of their human features through different types of metamorphoses. Vanni Fucci, the first thief we encounter, turns into ashes after he is bitten by a serpent; later, phoenix-like, he regains his human shape.¹ In Canto 25 another thief slowly merges with a serpent and turns into an indescribable monster.² The process of merging human and animal is described vividly by Dante—lines 61–63, for instance, are a representative example: “Poi s’appiccar, come di calda cera/fossero stati, e mischiar lor colore,/né l’un né l’altro già parea quel ch’era [then, as if they had been of hot wax, they stuck together and mixed their colors, and neither the one nor the other now seemed what it was at first].” Another type of metamorphosis, also in Canto 25, lines 79–138, consists of a sinner merging with, and actually turning into, a serpent. The lapsarian implications of these never-ending transformations seem evident, but the reasons for the thieves’ loss of their human features are less apparent.³ Writing about these cantos, Joan Ferrante has argued that the thieves’ transformations suggest that Dante sees “property as a part of the self” and, she continues, in this sense, “an exchange of property is a kind of metamorphosis, and the illicit exchange of property is presented in this section as actual metamorphosis.”⁴ By stealing their victims’ property, these sinners robbed others not simply of objects, but a part of their very selves, and, in perfect contrapasso, their punishment in hell is to be in a constant process of transformation of their own selves.

Dante’s literal treatment of the sin of stealing is an illuminating point of entry for interrogating the relationship between self and property in other medieval texts, for Dante’s perception of such a continuity was not unique to him as a medieval author. Recent studies by medieval literary scholars who have turned to “thing theory” have shown that objects and subjects construct each other in medieval texts in complex ways.⁵ Kellie Robertson, for instance, has examined what she aptly calls “the porous boundary between subjects and objects in the medieval period.”⁶ Robertson has noted “the very intense interest that medieval texts show in objects and their ability to shape human consciousness.”⁷ Current scholarship on this intense medieval interest stems in part from developments in “thing theory,” particularly since the publication of a 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry edited by Bill Brown and focused on “Things,” and in part from earlier work on materialism.⁸ Some of this work focuses on the ways in which things themselves seem to take on a life of their own or are even assigned human features; others have interrogated the ways in which selves construct their sense of identity through things.⁹

Such analyses of the interaction between things and selves do not usually consider the significance of the property relationship between the owner and the thing possessed. As Dante’s treatment of the thieves—those who steal possessions—suggests, when we investigate the interaction between objects and things, we need to pay attention to the concept of ownership as well. One may have a relationship to a thing without actually owning it; if one does have a property relationship with a thing, this relationship acquires an added dimension. Writing about Henry de Bracton’s De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae—a voluminous and unfinished legal work widely copied in the fourteenth century, which devotes more than half its pages to discussing “things” and how one may acquire dominion over things—L. O. Aranye Fradenburg has argued that “[f]or a thing to come within the sphere of the law means that it is not a wild thing; it must be a thing that has a relationship to a person, that has a social history. Conversely, it is also true that for a person to...