The Medieval Gift and the Classical Tradition

"Introduction: Since the 1960s historians studying gift giving have significantly deepened and nuanced our understanding of social, political and religious relations in medieval Europe. From the outset, historians have tended to see gift giving in terms of 'folk models.' In this they have been following in the footsteps of the social anthropologists from whom we have inherited the analytical apparatus of 'gift giving.' The founding father of gift-studies, Marcel Mauss, in his Essai sur le don, presented reciprocal gift exchange as a characteristic feature of archaic societies, found in its clearest form in 'primitive' cultures like that of ancient Germania. Pioneers in the field of medieval gift giving, such as Aaron Gurevich and George Duby, inherited the assumption that gift exchange and the rules of reciprocity that governed it were part of the cultural heritage passed down from the medieval elite's Germanic ancestors. More recently, as we shall see below, historians have been more cautious about explaining medieval gift giving through its supposed archaic roots. The assumption that gift exchange was based on folk traditions of reciprocity deployed in a difficult encounter with Biblical injunctions to charity, has, however, remained widely influential. In this book I suggest that this analytical tradition has led us to overlook or underestimate the influence exercised on medieval gift giving by a very different tradition: classical literature and philosophy"--