In many ways, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Patterson's book, and I think there will be a great deal of parsing ahead before I properly discern the arguments therein. In sum, Patterson is interested in Chaucer's use of subjectivity in history, which Patterson uses as a guide for his readings through several of Chaucer's texts. In his chapter on Troilus and Criseyde, for example, Patterson suggests that within the historical setting of Troy Chaucer has formed three characters whose respective subjectivities disallow them to share a proper or realistic understanding of their situation or the possibilities before them. In the chapter on the Wife of Bath, Patterson suggests that the Wife is her own subjective identity, defying authority by her very presence even while validating that which she defies. What was most interesting for me, however, was Patterson's chapter on the Man of Law's Tale and the Shipman's Tale.
In his chapter on the Man of Law's Tale and the Shipman's Tale, Patterson considers the role of commerce within Chaucer's work. Specifically, Patterson suggests that the world of commerce hangs over the bourgeois identities of these two figures and their tales. For the Shipman's Tale in particular, Patterson argues that the concern of money and exchange features explicitly in the narrative. For Patterson, the "magical" production of profit from the exchange of the same amount of currency, that eventually makes it back to its original owner, reflects a general mystery about the nature of market exchanges. Patterson teases this argument out further to suggest that this reflects a larger concern with the process of commodification that market transactions inevitably seem to lead to. To read this back into the Shipman's Tale, the merchant's wife has sold her own sexual goods at a set amount, thus making her body an exchangeable commodity. This, according to Patterson, leads to an ideological concern that commodification removes any value but exchange value, reducing people to the same worth as expensive (or inexpensive) objects. Patterson also traces the economic aspects of the marital markets in this tale, making the suggestion that the merchant accepts his wife's word as credit and, from this point, that Chaucer constructs a mercantile identity that, aware of the necessary contingent nature of market exchanges, constructs a "reliance upon goodwill" (358).
In general I found the above chapter interesting, but I would perhaps like to see some of these puts put in conversation with more current scholarship (an inevitably unfair request for reading any source from the past). For example, Patterson's discussion of the "private lives" that women lead in the introduction would, I think, be largely challenged by more recent work on the role of women in public marketplaces and trades. Furthermore, while Patterson's unpacking of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is good, this section of the argument at large would perhaps be informed by more recent work on medieval economic thought. It is not that Patterson's points have been outright countered, but he at times presents a monochromatic perception of the economic state of late medieval England rather than, as work such as Diana Wood's has shown, a spectrum of opinion and perception of money and merchants.
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