The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England by Diane Cady (review)

This innovative, engaging study explores how gender and economics are mutually reinforcing discourses in the literature of late medieval England, a time before the bifurcation of political economy from domestic economy (a change Cady locates in the eighteenth century) occluded their interdependence (7). The book analyzes a wide range of poems in Middle English, from works by Chaucer and Gower to anonymous romances, to uncover a set of interlocking representations of gender and money. In text after text, Cady finds that wealth is a masculine prerogative, while poverty is emasculating; women are objects for possession, simultaneously untrustworthy and fickle like money itself. As she persuasively argues, these insights hold profound implications for how to think about both gender and economics, in the medieval period and also in the present day.

Taking as its focus "gender as ideology" rather than embodied gender, Cady's analysis is particularly indebted to the work of Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" [1977]) and Jean-Joseph Goux (Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud [1973, trans. 1990]). The influence of the former resonates most strongly in the book's organization around narratives of heterosexual courtship, in which men's relationships to material goods are negotiated through their relationships to women, and vice versa. In the introduction, Cady situates her argument within the rich vein of recent work in Middle English on economics and literature (4). Yet in blending historicism with psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches, the book also harkens back to the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s (6).

Chapter 2, the first body chapter, elaborates two main claims: "Money and women have a similar nature, one that is marked by instability and movement," and "the link between erotic and fiscal possession in the medieval cultural imaginary [is crucial to] the construction of male identity" (13). To develop these claims, Cady explores medieval theories of reproduction as well as monetary value, before offering a series of close readings that illustrate the fickle qualities of female characters and their role as repositories of value in a series of representative texts, including the Lady Meed episode of Piers Plowman, Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal, and The Reeve's Tale.

The book's third chapter attends to a single text, the anonymous late medieval/Tudor romance The Squire of Low Degree, to explore how the text "enact[s] … fiscal and sexual fantasies" (33) that are essentially intertwined as the Squire seeks both love and money in the King of Hungary's court. Cady reads the king's daughter's seven-year retreat to her chamber in the company of a dead body as a refusal to participate in the erotic economy in lieu of a more transgressive expression of libidinal energy. The daughter ultimately returns to circulation through her father's power, revealing both a conservative gender ideology that reserves power and wealth for the sovereign patriarch, and the conservatism of the romance genre more generally.

Chapter 4 announces a new section, which turns to the notion of value itself and "how gendered notions of economy inform the ways we think about value, especially in realms that the West often treats as 'value free' or beyond economy, such as friendship, love, and poetics" (51). The three chapters that follow are an especially coherent and successful section of the book, perhaps because they mark a concurrent narrowing in focus to the nature of masculinity within the gendered economy. The fourth chapter, on Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum, takes up friendship and its discontents within the context of the interested exchanges of goods that the characters' livelihoods comprise. The flow of goods between the narrative's two merchants allows us to chart an anxious masculinity, hemmed in by dangers: to trade in goods is to risk loss, yet to be too free with...