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

Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance is interested in the symbolic violence of later Middle English romances and how mercantile concerns (both internal to these texts and external material forces) became central to the continuation and transformation of the genre from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. It focuses upon the “noble gift” in these works, upon the chaotic and destructive roles those gifts play in class dynamics and in the “cult of chivalry” (p. 118), and upon the “persistence” of the genre in England into the fifteenth century. The “returns” of Middle English romance therefore reflect the benefit, or profit, exhibited in these romances in such tropes as gift-giving, as well as the continual return of the genre into the cultural work of late medieval England. As such, it joins the ranks of Patricia Ingham’s Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (2001) and Michael Johnston’s Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (2014) in its focus on the role of the genre vis-à-vis social structures and nationalistic concerns of late medieval England.

The first chapter, “The Persistence of Romance,” focuses on the recurrence of the genre throughout the Middle Ages, especially in England where it was “in many ways outmoded from its moment of arrival on English soil” (p. 15). Interrogating the significant role that gift-giving plays in understanding the genre, and on “aristocratic gift-giving as a hermeneutic for understanding medieval literature” (p. 4), Wadiak places that trope within a theoretical framework informed by psychological and social theorists such as Bourdieu and Lacan. The chapter explores the symbolic violence associated with such gift-giving in the context of romance, as well as the conflicted approaches modern scholars have taken to this trope, from Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason of Exchange in Archaic Societies to George Duby’s The Early Growth of the European Economy. The chapter then turns to a reading of the thirteenth-century Floris and Blancheflour, which Wadiak characterizes as “a counterinfiltration of the citadel of commerce mounted by the powers of romance” (p. 21). For Wadiak, the symbolic violence of gift-giving in Floris appeals to both the aristocrat and the nonaristocratic merchant, suggesting that “chivalry and its violence are destined to become the imaginative basis of regimes that seem on their face to have left these things behind” (p. 29).

The next three chapters engage in readings and analyses of an array of later Middle English romances, from the often studied (like Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale) to the rarely examined (such as Sir Cleges). The second chapter, “The Gift and Its Returns,” covers a number of mostly shorter later medieval English romances, including The Awntyrs off Arthur, Sir Cleges, Sir Launfal, and Sir Amadace. Wadiak argues that these works target, in part, mercantile culture, being both “as much a product of that culture as a reaction against it” (p. 37). For Wadiak, the ghosts that appear in most of the works (all but Sir Cleges) represent a return of symbolic aristocratic violence, and even Sir Cleges, while it lacks a ghost, portrays “the return of a violence that cannot be fully erased from the post-feudal moment described by spendthrift romances” (38). In all of these romances, Wadiak suggests, commodification and aristocratic violence are intertwined, making for a troubling relationship between the knights common to the genre and the merchants and laborers emerging later in that tradition, both as characters in and as consumers of Middle English romance. In Chapter 3, “Chaucerian Capital,” Wadiak turns to Chaucer, primarily The Knight’s Tale, to explore not only the role of gifts in Chaucer’s poetry (as has been addressed in a number of prior studies) but also how Chaucer might have thought of his work as a kind of cultural gift among an increasingly bourgeois and mercantile readership. For Wadiak...