This project examines how three Middle English texts---the poem Pearl, the long prose treatise Dives and Pauper, and The Book of Margery Kempe---use the language of gift-giving to imagine alternatives to the competitive cultures of English court and marketplace during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I argue that early capitalism is only one of several modes of exchange available to late medieval writers, along with the gift-economy (first theorized by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss) and forms of mercantile exchange inflected by local markets and cultures of credit. The medieval writers considered in this project understand gift exchanges as creating relationships of loyalty, hierarchy, and mutual dependence. While two of the authors under consideration welcome such relationships as potentially fostering reconciliation between individuals and God, or individuals and each other, the third, Margery Kempe, sees divine gift-giving as a release from a hostile and oppressive mercantile culture. I argue that the use of these categories by Middle English writers enriches our understanding of economics through the possibility of exchanges informed not by self-interested competition but by generosity and reciprocity.
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机译：该项目研究了三种中古英语文本-《珍珠》，长篇散文集《 Dives and Pauper》和《玛格丽·肯培之书》-如何使用馈赠语言来想象替代英国法庭和英国文化的竞争文化。第十四和第十五世纪的市场。我认为，早期的资本主义只是中世纪晚期作家可以使用的几种交换方式中的一种，还有礼物经济（最早由人类学家马塞尔·莫斯（Marcel Mauss）提出的理论）以及受当地市场和信贷文化影响的商品交换形式。在该项目中考虑的中世纪作家将礼物交换理解为建立忠诚，等级和相互依赖的关系。在考虑中的两位作者欢迎这样的关系时，可能促进个人与上帝之间，或个人与彼此之间的和解，而第三位作者玛格丽·肯佩则认为，给予上帝的礼物是对敌对和压迫性商业文化的一种释放。我认为，中古英语作家对这些类别的使用通过不以自利竞争为基础，而是以慷慨和互惠为基础进行交流的可能性，丰富了我们对经济学的理解。
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