D.
Vance Smith.
Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household
Imaginary.
Minnesota U.P., due
January
2003.
Medieval Cultures Series, volume 33.
280pp.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback ISBN: 0816639507, $63.95
Paperback ISBN:
0816639515, $22.95
Exposes
the centrality
of the household to cultural practices of the medieval period. An
innovative
work of both economic anthropology and literary history, Arts of
Possession
draws on philosophical, theoretical, literary, historical, and archival
sources and insights to situate the household at the center of the
social
and cultural imagination of fourteenth-century England.
D.
Vance Smith
argues that in a period commonly represented as precapitalist there
actually
existed a sophisticated economic discourse-and this discourse underlies
common forms of representation and the writing of literary texts. His
work
provides a new historiography of capital and of the development of the
relation between economic sophistication and cultural practices. Smith
reads well-known and less-appreciated works - such as Winner and
Waster, Sir
Launfal, The Canterbury Tales, and Piers Plowman -
for
what they can tell us about the surpluses and economies that drew the
medieval
imagination, and about the complex ethics of possession at the heart of
the fourteenth-century household. In bringing this to light, Smith's
book
itself becomes an eloquent meditation on the poetics and ethics of
possession.
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