"Money Earned, Money Won": The Problem of Labor Pricing in Gower's "Tale of the King and the Steward's Wife."

Author/Editor
Bertolet, Craig.

Title
"Money Earned, Money Won": The Problem of Labor Pricing in Gower's "Tale of the King and the Steward's Wife."

Published
Bertolet, Craig. "'Money Earned, Money Won': The Problem of Labor Pricing in Gower's 'Tale of the King and the Steward's Wife'." In Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature. Ed. Craig E. Bertolet and Robert Epstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 143-56.

Review
Bertolet's interpretative base is the emergence of a cash-based economy in the late fourteenth century, and its conflicted relationship with the still-dominant oath-and-labor-based economy characteristic of feudalism. This serves as the lens through which he reads Gower's tale of a king whose illness can only be cured by intercourse with a woman; his steward who, charged by the king to bring him a woman willing to share his bed for £100 in gold, provides his own wife to the king, seeking the gold only for himself, and the wife who, however reluctantly, performs so much to the king's satisfaction that he marries her after banishing the steward for his greed, as one who has his "oghne astat reviled" (152). Bertolet recognizes that the tale "on the surface" examines "the injustice of prostituting one's own wife," but, in an analysis that draws on contemporary economic theory, Aristotle's "Politics" and "Ethics," Aquinas' commentary on the latter, and Nicole Oresme's "De moneta," argues that "Gower's reason for telling this story is much more sophisticated than this and . . . follows his general plan of exploring how the cash-based commercial economy affects feudal relationships" (144). The king and the woman are shown to be blameless under both cash- and labor-based economies, since "the king is in health with a wife and the potential for heirs. The new queen has earned her position as queen with her value appreciated" (153) and the steward, who "has done no honest labor . . . receives no commensurate reward" (154). Thus "the two economic systems stay distinct, even if the steward attempted to blur them" (154). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1.]

Date
2018

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis