Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance by Walter Wadiak (review)

In Savage Economy, Walter Wadiak reads the problem of the donum through select Middle English romances. In particular, Wadiak investigates and indexes these romances' treatment of 'bad gifts—the kind that compel or seduce us into submission' (p. xiii), as Wadiak convincingly puts it. There are, of course, bad gifts and good. Wadiak's graceful acknowledgments tell us of the good gifts that Wadiak got from friends, comrades, and—not least—from his teachers. Of course, it is not unexpected to thank one's long-suffering teachers in a first book, but, for Wadiak's volume, teaching is a key to the mode of Savage Economy: Wadiak's analyses are very teacherly, very much the careful and keen preparations of a medievalist exploring with those in his seminar just what the contested thing called 'romance' in the Middle Ages is, beyond its denotative meaning. Yet, that obligatory scene behind the lectern does not get us far into the adventure of defining the parameters of romance: Wadiak quotes a snippet from Dieter Mehl's magisterial study of Middle English romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (1968) about the impossibility of generalizing the unruly category of medieval romances, in which texts seem to share so few traits with each other. More nuanced treatments of the opening gambit in which the romance is described are found in, e.g., Helen Cooper's introduction to her sharp and expansive The English Romance in Time (2004; see especially the subsection 'Recognizing Romance,' pp 7–15), a work which Wadiak uses and quotes approvingly (p. 16), though not in regard to comprehending the genre of 'romance.

Wadiak's syllabus for Savage Economy consists of well-chosen core texts: Floris and Blancheflour; The Awntyrs off Arthur; Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale and, briefly, his House of Fame; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and several later romances of Gawain, including Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, and The Turke and Sir Gawain (the latter omitted under the heading 'Gawain-romances' in the usually helpful index); and some crucial outlaw narratives, principally The Tale of Gamelyn and A Gest of Robyn Hode, with a nod to Hereward the Wake. Wadiak works through these texts chronologically in five chapters, following a broad historical arc of Middle English romances as literary constructions that evolve from texts that directly affirm a violence-infused aristocracy to those that fashion late-medieval mercantile communities featuring outlaw champions. These are fascinating reads, especially when driven by Wadiak's sense of these texts as 'perform[ing] a violence that continues to haunt us' (p. x).

Wadiak is sure-footed when he turns from describing the 'romance' to reading a romance. Declaring that 'English romance imagines itself as a gift from its first lines' (p. 2), Wadiak explores the quite early, quite strange, and completely riveting Middle English King Horn. Wadiak states that King Horn 'begins by promising us a gift in the form of a hero so exceptional and rare, so unlike anything or anyone else . . . that he quite literally lights up any room he enters, himself the bearer of charisma in the original sense of a "divine gift"' (p. 2). These links are silvered with inspiration, and they suggest ways in which Wadiak's Savage Economy 'takes up [D. Vance] Smith's invitation to trace . . . "forms of surplus and exchange that continue to haunt us, forms whose persistence economic anthropology has not fully recognized"' (p. 4). Smith's Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (2003) considers the anxieties of surplus within the medieval household and the desire for—and fear of loss of—the 'object' for an historically realizable medieval individual. Smith reads not only from medieval romance and other literary texts like Winner and Waster, but also from archival sources like heraldry, household accounts, coinage, and judicial records. Bending his ruminations outward from...