The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins (review)

A recent spate of publications on the topics of value and exchange in late medieval literature has demonstrated their enduring importance while taking them in invigorating new directions. The present volume joins the worthy company of, for example, Diane Cady's The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature (2019), Robert Epstein's Chaucer's Gifts (2018), and Walter Wadiak's Savage Economy (2017), with the latter two books, as Nicholas Perkins recognizes, having particular affinity with his own. Both Epstein and Wadiak, like Perkins, bring to bear on the literature of late medieval England theories of the gift that ultimately have roots in such key figures as Marcel Mauss. Perkins shares Wadiak's focus on romance and Epstein's interest in the conditions that make generosity possible, and there is some overlap among the three books in the specific texts covered. Yet Perkins not only explores this common ground in a rather different way, but also branches off into different theoretical, methodological, and literary territory. The Gift of Narrative thus has a great deal to offer beyond its engagements with its most proximate interlocutors.

Those familiar with Perkins's scholarship will recognize in this book his characteristic nimbleness with theoretical complexities and tangled literary critical debates, applying the former and intervening in the latter with crystalline clarity that nonetheless does not oversimplify. In this book, the theoretical complexities primarily attend anthropological accounts of the gift and related poststructuralist meditations thereon. Indeed, while in the book's conclusion Perkins characterizes his use of this body of theory as an instrument for opening up "more paths for reading medieval texts, here especially romances" (239), in many passages he works the converse direction. Thus, for example, when he asserts in the penultimate sentence of his introduction that his exploration of "a network of messages in romance" will suggest "how generosity, though always at interplay with dynamics of power and conflict, may open the self to the other" (10), he does not mean only to characterize medieval romance; he is making an anthropological and ethical argument to which medieval romance attests. His general label for the romances that he considers—"speculative Anthropology"—neatly encapsulates his own approach, which, in its explorations of the anthropological work that literature performs, is disciplinarily Janus-faced.

Although this double movement of the book's logic makes it rather difficult to summarize, Perkins's lucid prose enables one to pick out highlights that will suggest its flavor. Following an introduction that describes the book's overall approach, theoretical touchstones, and key critical interlocutors, the first chapter directs most of its literary attention to the late-twelfth-century Anglo-French Romance of Horn. But this chapter is also the most intensively theoretical of the book, formulating concepts that are drawn upon in the subsequent chapters. Using literary readings as a springboard, it provides a denser account of gift theory than that of the introduction, and considers in particular the question of the possibility of generosity. At the conclusion of an intricate argument involving several interlocutors, Perkins connects the forgetting/recalling of origins in the Romance of Horn with Pierre's Bourdieu's notion of the generative nature of misrecognition in acts of gift-giving and -receiving, enabling such acts, as Perkins phrases it, to be "both a moment to set aside the structures demanding reciprocity or return, and a moment when those very structures are most acutely activated and set in motion" (58–59).

Chapter 2 introduces Annette Weiner's Inalienable Possessions (1992) into the book's theoretical landscape, adding the economies of keeping to those of giving. The principal literary focuses are three Auchinleck romances—Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem, and Sir Orfeo—and that most complex of all medieval romances centered around gift and exchange, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Exhibiting the bidirectionality of the book's argumentation, Perkins observes about the latter, "The poet's meditation...