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ABSTRACT
This article explores deeply unsettled aspects of medieval discourses on usury and neighbor love during the later Middle Ages. A comparative analysis of the anonymous fifteenth-century poem The Childe of Bristowe, and Chaucer’s well-known late fourteenth-century work, The Prioress’s Tale, uncovers differential medieval valuations of what is “owed” to the neighbor in ethical as well as monetary terms. I ask how ideas of neighborly obligation and sin stack up in these two very different meditations on ethical relationality, community, and spiritual debts, against a background of market-driven monetary practices. The usurious Christian father in The Child of Bristowe reveals the fault lines of Christian theological discourses on usury, as well as some possibilities for recompense and renewal in this theological system, in terms of the dual commandment enjoining both love of Father and love of neighbor. Where neighbor love fails, in The Prioress’s Tale, it is at the boundaries between and within communities, where ethical searching gives way to false certainties and the insistence that there is nothing more to know about who the neighbor is or what we might owe him.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the anonymous reviewer at Exemplaria for incisive and helpful feedback on this article. Thanks are also due to Jessica Rosenfeld, who has been so patient and magnanimous as I have worked to revise it. Finally I am grateful to my frequent collaborator and friend, Heather Blurton, for her early comments on this work, and for acting as sounding board for me on so many occasions.
Notes
1. The entry for debeo in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Ashdown, Howlett, and Latham Citation2018) Online (DMLBS) includes the following definitions: “to owe money or goods … service … oneself … penalty,” a “debt due,” and “to be bound, obliged.” DMLBS (Citation2015) s.v. debēre.
2. Jacques Le Goff identifies this passage as the only one of the five major biblical supports for the prohibition on usury to be drawn from the New Testament. The other key texts are: Exodus 22:24; Lev. 25:35–7; Deut. 23:20–1; and Psalm 15. See Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, translated by Patricia Ranum (New York: Zone Books, Citation1988), 21–3.
3. As T. P. McLaughlin explained in an influential early study, the definition of usury was also interpreted more broadly to cover any situation in which one might receive “more than the sum lent, not only of money but of anything in kind, wheat, wine or oil. Any excess demanded, though it be a small gift, is usury. To receive an emolument in the form of merchandise from a merchant to whom money has been loaned comes under the same condemnation” (Citation1939, 95). McLaughlin, “The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury” Mediaeval Studies 1 (Citation1939): 82–107 and 2 (Citation1940): 1–22.
4. T. P. McLaughlin notes that the Latin term “interesse” addresses precisely this gap, referring to damages owed to a lender (McLaughlin Citation1939, 89). This term has its roots in the Latin verb “intersum, interesse,” “to be between, lie between,” or “to intervene or elapse.”
5. These exemptions are also discussed in Noonan (Citation1957, 100–33).
6. Indeed, this distinction remains troubling even in the twenty-first century. While the Catholic Church is no opponent of traditional banking, Pope Francis has been vocal in condemning usury, defined as “lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.” He has claimed, “Usury humiliates and kills … It kills life, stomps on human dignity, promotes corruption, and sets up obstacles to the common good” (Watkins Citation2018). Secular critics of practices such as payday lending and exorbitant credit card interest rates use different language to much the same end, describing “excessive” interest as exploitative, particularly of the poor, and the opposite of consideration for one’s neighbor.
7. See Geraldine Heng’s (Citation2018) recent discussion in The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages for a cogent overview of the risks and dangers for Jewish communities that came on the heels of their close association with the handling and managing of money. Roger Ladd writes that because “Italians came to dominate international finance and credit, and were often favored by the English crown in exchange for loans,” they “were extremely unpopular in London, and Italians were occasionally the victims of violence and murder at the hands of London merchants” (Citation2010, 19; also see 67–8). For a fuller account, see Nightingale (Citation1995), 213–33.
8. Both poems appear in William Hazlitt Citation1864–6, I.111–31 and I.132–52. Although previous critics have tended to analyze these poems together because of their status as related analogues, I focus here only on Bristowe, both because I am interested in it as a distinct work, and because I want to consider this poem in light of its suggestive pairing with The Prioress’s Tale in manuscript.
9. Quotations from The Childe of Bristowe use the Middle English text of William Carew Hazlitt’s edition in his Remains of Early Popular Poetry of England, Vol. I (Citation1864).
10. For another account of these trends, see Todeschini (Citation2009).
11. All references to the Prioress's Tale are from The Riverside Chaucer edition edited by Larry D. Benson (Citation1987).
12. For the most recent review of the storied history of scholarship on The Prioress’s Tale, see Blurton and Johnson, The Critics and the Prioress (Citation2017). For a discussion of the association between Jews and excrement in medieval culture, see Bale (Citation2006), 23–54. Little discusses some of the longstanding associations between money and both digestion and excrement (Citation1983, 35–41).
13. See Mell (Citation2018), “The Discourse of Usury and the Emergence of the Stereotype of the Jewish Usurer in Medieval France,” 3–112.
14. See especially the recent special forum on Mell’s work appearing in Marginalia, a special section of the LA Review of Books edited by Nina Caputo.
15. For the antiquaries, see Hazlitt (Citation1864–6) Horstmann (Citation1881), Hopper (Citation1859), and Wright (Citation1854).
16. V.J. Scattergood is a fellow traveler in this tradition, citing the poem in passing in support of a larger point about attitudes toward trade in the fifteenth century (see Scattergood Citation1972, 331).
17. In this context, it is worth recollecting David Lawton’s astute suggestion that the much-observed “dullness” of the fifteenth century can serve as a rhetorical strategy on the part of the author as well as an evaluative judgment by the modern critic (Citation1987).
18. In this case literally so. Little describes the penalties for usury within the Church, including the possible refusal of a Christian burial unless and until restitution was made to borrowers (Citation1983, 211–3). Le Goff discusses a number of exempla that illustrate this peril in nightmarish terms (Citation1988, esp. 47–64). Ladd adds that English canon law specifies excommunication as a punishment for usury (Citation2010, 19).
19. While this is not the place to offer an inventory of such practices, it is instructive to consider just one of the factors that might easily lead one into sin. Often the difference between a usurious and a non-usurious transaction came down to the intention of the person engaging in the deal. What quickly becomes clear in a review of scholastic reasoning on these questions is that if one incidentally makes a profit but did not engage in the deal intending to gain, then the profit is licit; if profit was one’s major goal, then the profit is ill-gotten. This presents a very slippery ground indeed for drawing conclusions about one’s own activities or those of a neighbor. See McLaughlin (Citation1939, Citation1940) for revealing characterizations in these terms. For a basic introduction of this idea see also Noonan (Citation1957, 32–3).
20. For an earlier discussion that addresses these questions beginning from a somewhat different vantage point, see Reinhard (Citation2006, 11–75).
21. For an extended discussion of the medieval theological idea that fear of God is the necessary first step toward love of Him, see Eric J. Johnson (Citation2000).
22. In one poem of the period, an author complains that “In Engeland, as all men wyten, / Law, as best, is solde and bouʒt” (cited in Scattergood Citation1972, 322).
23. Le Goff’s examination of the exemplary tradition suggests that this illustrates the child’s wisdom, since taking possession of the father’s ill-gotten gains would pass the taint of sinful possession on to him. Le Goff quotes an exemplum from Jacques de Vitry: “Indeed, certain usurers assign money to their sons, even before they are born, so that it can multiply by usury … Upon their death, they leave their money to their sons, and the latter begin to wage a new war against God” (cited in Le Goff Citation1988, 53).
24. See Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “asseth.”
25. See Roger Ladd’s discussion of Bristowe as a self-conscious mercantile response to charges of being overly preoccupied with materialism.
26. See Le Goff on the vital importance of purgatory in this context: “Purgatory was hope” (Citation1988, 92). Also see Le Goff (Citation1979, Citation1984).
27. These themes irresistibly recall Lydgate’s Fabula duorum mercatorum, as discussed in Lisa Cooper (Citation2008). Cooper discusses the remarkable love shared between two merchants and exhibited during hard times, along with the coupling of affective and economic registers of exchange in unexpected ways. I thank the anonymous reader at Exemplaria for bringing this source to my attention.
28. The Fasciculus Morum, for example, includes an entire subsection devoted to “Usury” within the chapter devoted to the sin of Avarice (Wenzel Citation1989, 346–55).
29. See Adrienne Boyarin’s interesting reading of the parallels between the two young boys in these poems (Citation2010, 162).
30. In addition to Edmondson, see the discussion of some questions concerning manuscript miscellany compilation in Blurton and Johnson (Citation2017, 162–7).
31. Reinhard (Citation2013) suggests this characterization may have its conceptual uses, but departs from Taubes, among others, in resisting the impulse to associate the vertical axis with Christianity, and the horizontal axis with Judaism.
32. See also Sara Lipton’s (Citation1999) discussion, esp. 31–40.
33. The manuscript is Bibliothèque nationale, MS Latin 13472, fol. 3v.
34. There is of course some structural irony in this, since medieval Christians typically described Jews as caring for or considering only other Jews. I am suggesting that The Prioress’s Tale operates according to just this kind of insular logic, but depicted as a feature of Christian community.
35. It is only fair to note that I have begun with ethics and ended with politics, whereas Reinhard, following Lacan, writes that we can only find “the place of the neighbor” between love and politics by “beginning with the political” (Citation2006, 71).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hannah Johnson
Hannah Johnson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Johnson’s previous works include Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History, and (with Heather Blurton) The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.