Andrew Galloway

Layamon’s Gift

Layamon’s Brut, from a moment in English literary and cultural history whose sense of tradition is particularly difficult for us to comprehend—a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, at the beginnings of Middle English—has a notoriously complex relation to England’s past and traditions. This essay focuses on how The Brut takes a traditional social and literary preoccupation in pre-Conquest England, the lordly gift exchange, and expands it to explore a new range of spiritual gifts (or deceptive claims to them), including professional knowledge, counsel to the powerful, and literary fame. This expansion of the gift corresponds to broad cultural shifts as well as to more topical matters in King John’s reign, the probable period of the poem’s composition. The poem fashions itself as a gift in these volatile terms, repeatedly embracing an unknown literary future while it accurately limns some fundamental new features of Middle English literature. (AG)

The Economy of Need in Late Medieval English Literature

Since the eighteenth century, economic thought has made identity legible in terms of production, consumption, and profit. This essay argues that, in contrast, in later medieval culture social thought was often framed in terms of an economy of need. The essay establishes that claim in the realms of canonists and theologians, but it also argues that, in a context where the blurring or transformation of the idea of need can be traced on many sides, late-medieval vernacular English writers—preachers, prose writers, poets—as well as artists addressing vernacular culture, more fully emphasized this “economy of need,” pursuing its details and contradictions. The London writers (Gower, Chaucer, and Langland) especially elaborated the contradictions of this frame of thought. The concept and its contradictions help explain many of their poetry’s preoccupations, even as their critical scrutiny shows how the idea of an “economy of need” would ultimately collapse.

Crossing the Threshold: Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, and the Liminal Transactionalism of the Later Middle Ages

This chapter considers the economic elements of Chaucer’s thought as revealed through his poetry in relation to the medievalism inherent in the foundational economic writings of Adam Smith. The chapter advances the notion of “liminal transactionalism” to describe an economic outlook and set of practices merging gift-exchange with commerce, a mode of thinking and practice that obtained from the later Middle Ages well into the early Modern period, and in which Chaucer’s and Smith’s thought, while significantly distinct, can both be located. To explore their different positions on this spectrum, the chapter addresses first the satirical dimensions of Smith’s view of the decline of “feudalism.” It then analyzes how the elements that Smith picks out in that decline—especially the over-emphasis on personal prestige by lords, and the growth of more independent practical strategies by those who served them—featured in late medieval English poetry, especially Chaucer’s. Finally, the chapter argues that the Smithian elements of Chaucer’s thought do not fully amount to a Smithian “classical” economic model, but that Smith himself retains elements of a Chaucerian or late-medieval combination of ways of defining economic value.

Religious forms and institutions in Piers Plowman

Which comes first: institutions or selves? Liberal democracies operate as if selves preceded institutions. By and large, pre-Reformation culture places the institution before the self. The self, and particularly the conscience as the source of deepest ethical and spiritual counsel, is intimately shaped, by the institution of the Church. This shaping is both ethical and spiritual; by no means least, it ensures the soul’s salvation, though administering the sacraments especially of baptism, penance, and the Eucharist. The conscience is not a lonely entity in such an institutional culture. It is, rather, the portable voice of accumulated, communal history and wisdom: it is, as the word itself suggests, a ‘con-scientia’, a ‘knowing with’. These tensions generate the extraordinary and conflicted account of self and institution in Langland’s Piers Plowman.

The Common Voice in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth Century England

This chapter focuses on voice less in those immediately material ways than more abstractly, in order to explore the boundary between works making primarily aesthetic claims and those with more direct claims on social or other extra-narrative meaning. The world of parliamentary ?common petitions? and, still more, of divisive and in some measure electoral London political culture suggests the emergence of general discussion of political (and religious) ideas that lay the foundations of the ?public sphere? as that notion is defined by the social philosopher Jurgen Habermas. But careful manipulation of who spoke for and against whom shows the importance of assessing the theory and practice of such voicing, and seeking a range of cultural realms in which representative and collective forms of voicing could both define anxieties as well as ideals about political community and political theory, sovereignty and constitutionalism. Keywords:constitutionalism; England; political community; political theory; sovereignty; voicing