R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word.

Shoaf, R. A. Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word. Norman: Pilgirm, 1983. Print.

This is the second time I've gone to Shoaf's book, the first for a Dante paper from the second semester of my MA. Coming back to the text was interesting in that the process quickly revealed how much my perceptions have shifted. Shoaf argues that money is pervasive for Dante and Chaucer respective sociohistorical contexts, and money is itself a necessary but problematic medium of exchange vulnerable to constant falsification. However, Shoaf pushes this point further by arguing that for Dante and Chaucer words themselves function as money does, providing a medium for social, poetic, and semiotic exchange. If, according to Shoaf, words function like money and Dante and Chaucer are specifically concerned with the potential for money to be falsified, so too must these poets be concerned with the potential for words to be falsified. Shoaf unpacks this argument by first reading Dante's concerns on the matter, and then arguing that Chaucer was a careful reader of Dante, and that both Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales are extended readings of Dante's concern of the falsification of words as currency. 

Shoaf sets up some interesting economic arguments in this book, especially in his points about Criseyde's function as currency as others attempt to appropriate her for their own exchanges or outright re-mint her as well as his unpacking of the Wife of Bath's use of the exchangeability of words to make her anti-Jerome arguments. Yet, this points rely overly much on Chaucer being a close reader of Dante without, perhaps, the convincing evidence that would aid this reading or even, frankly, the necessity to do so. Shoaf's arguments on Chaucer would function as well by positing that Chaucer is in a similar sociohistorical context as Dante and as positioned to see and critique the function of money. Also, I appreciate better now the sections in which Shoaf brings in Aristotelian models of exchange, but having read more thoroughly on medieval economic thought this section now feels in need of greater expansion. This is of course rather unfair as scholarly work in that specific field has increased exponentially since Shoaf's text, and regardless of this issues Shaof's work is still a rather engaging combination of economic and semiotic arguments of two of the most well known medieval European poets.