Chaucer's Gifts: Exchange and Value in the Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—the most celebrated literary work of medieval England—portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world, or in his poem.

In Chaucer’s Gifts, Robert Epstein reveals the complex gift economy at work in the Tales. To explain the network of exchanges and obligations found in the Canterbury Tale...