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

Wadiak's Savage Economy is a densely theoretical but eminently readable study focusing on 'the meaning of gift giving in medieval romances, but […] more broadly about the kind of thing a medieval romance is' (p. 1). As this statement indicates, the book's critical focus regularly shifts between detailed close reading and a much broader theoretical overview. Though this is one of the study's main strengths, the sometimes abrupt switching between close and distant focus can occasionally jar. Wadiak's careful and sustained close analysis of his chosen texts—a technique that seems to have gone rather out of fashion in much recent scholarship—is, for this reviewer, the book's chief delight. However, the reader's progress through the work would perhaps be easier if the study's theoretical underpinnings were integrated more smoothly into the close analysis. This is especially noticeable in Chapter 1, where the switch from discussion of cultural and anthropological theory to detailed close reading seems particularly abrupt.

This is an ambitious study, evident in the fact that it never quite seems to make up its mind what its central focus is. We are told that '[v]iolence—who got to use it and who was on the receiving end of it—is […] the central question of this book' (p. viii). The issue of violence as 'a gift or donum […] that underwrites and reaffirms the feudal power of a privileged group' (p. viii) does indeed run right through the work, leading ultimately to the exploration of 'how violence becomes the sign of value that unites a community' (p. xi). But the study is also interested in the 'symbolic power of romance' (p. vii), exploring how the retrospective quality that characterizes so many of the late medieval romances may be 'ideological rather than simply narrative' (p. vii). Moreover, although the stated thesis hinges on the exchange of violence, other types of exchange present in medieval romance are occasionally considered, albeit often briefly. Mercantile exchange is treated fairly comprehensively in Chapter 3 and the latter half of Chapter 1, but the 'exchange of women' (p. 24), for example, is raised almost in passing in the middle of Chapter 1 without being developed further. The study also devotes considerable attention to what Wadiak reads as the tension between older 'chivalric ideology' (p. ix) and the competing ideological demands of the rising bourgeois and mercantile classes. As he himself admits, this is 'all too often generaliz[ation] about texts whose precise social locations are remarkably diverse' (p. ix). Ultimately Wadiak seems to read his chosen texts almost as being all things to all readers, and it is perhaps fair to say that this book tries to do the same. Each of its various different avenues is fruitful and productive, but they run almost as completely separate lines of enquiry rather than intersecting to create a holistic whole.

After a brief preface, Chapter 1 opens, as already noted, with an extended digest of theoretical material on gift theory; Marcel Mauss's work, in particular, features heavily. This leads into a discussion of the gifted cup which is an integral feature of Floris and Blancheflour. Despite the book's stated focus on the later or 'belated' romances, Floris is actually one of the earliest, dating from around the mid-thirteenth century. Wadiak reads the poem as 'broadly a story of what we might think of as a counterinfiltration of the citadel of commerce mounted by the powers of romance' (p. 21). Chapter 2 reads The Awntyrs off Arthur, Sir Amadace, and Sir Launfal as 'late medieval ghost stories' concerned with 'the future of romance' (p. 31). The chapter's discussion of the 'chivalric economy', which Wadiak views as reliant on 'not wealth […] but blood' (p. 60), segues into Chapter 3's exploration of Chaucer's mercantile concerns. This ultimately suggests that The Knight's Tale, like the older romances it follows, 'expresses...