Diane Cady "Symbolic Economies."

Diane Cady "Symbolic Economies." Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English. Ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

In her contribution to Strohm's companion to Middle English literature, Diane Cady explores how Jean-Joseph Goux's work in Symbolic Economies applies to work in Middle English Literature. Goux's text aims to consider a "style of thought" across "economics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis" (124). For Goux, these social domains share a common "investment in exchange and value, an investment that is gendered" (125). In short, efforts to apply controlling constraints and rules on matters of language and economics tend towards gendered paradigms, women associated with a changing and chaotic force while men are the controlling presence that applies order and structure to that chaos. Throughout her chapter, Cady plots out how medieval economic and linguistic thought applied similar paradigms, following from Aristotle's work on the matter. Cady concludes her article with a reading of the first three passus of The Vision of Piers the Plowman, considering the disruptive role that women and money play in the text and how male characters attempt to act as checks to that disruption.

Cady's chapter bears some similarity with her article, "The Gender of Money," which I will write something on later. In both cases, Cady interest is in the exchangeability of women in medieval thought, a trait that, like currency, requires careful control. As Cady states, "Money and women are imagined to have the same character: both are supposedly passive yet potentially powerful; both are unstable and do not hold their 'imprint' ... both endanger homosocial bonds; and both are seen as items of exchange" (126). This line of thought runs close to that in Cady's article, where she plots similar concepts in her reading of the Wife of Bath and Langland's Lady Mede; "Mede serves as a warning to all “wanton” women, who might, like the Wife of Bath, choose to “wander by the weye” (I.A.467), as well as a reminder to the reader that women, like money, are likely to wander if they are not controlled by society" (19). 

In this chapter, Cady spends more time plotting out some of the medieval economic thought at hand, specifically that of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as tracing similar threads in Alain de Lille's Complaint of Nature, John Salisbury's Metalogicon, and Oresme's De moneta. Interestingly, each of these texts admits, to one extent or another, that language and/or money is an artificial construction yet attempts to lean on classical naturalistic arguments for each. Aside from demonstrating nostalgia for a pre-Fall condition in which language was purely literal and money was unnecessary, these arguments attempt to use nature to support gendered metaphors for considering the construction of language and money. Thus, grammar is necessary in language as a masculine force that brings order to a constantly changing linguistic and feminine mess, and improper exchange was often treated with the same language as sexual wantonness from women. Cady's treatment of Oresme is particularly telling in considering this construction against the constant instabilities of currency due to debasement from governmental sources seeking profit. I'm still trying to parse how the constructions here apply to other avenues of medieval economic thought, but Cady's close attention to the gendering of money and economic language is invaluable to any discussion of economics in Middle English literature, my own work first and foremost.