Notes to Introduction

1. The position I sketch out in this introduction is variously informed, but the following works have the most to do with its shape and tone: Aers 1980; Alford 1977:941-51; Alford 1979:377-96; Allen and Moritz 1981; Arendt 1958:236-47; Arendt 1972:460-79; Arendt 1977-78:2, 84-110; Auerbach 1957:151-77; Barthes 1966:56-57, Barthes 1979:73-81; Bloch 1977:108-214; Coward and Ellis 1977:25-60; de Man 1971:20-34; Derrida 1974:6-16; Durling 1981:61-93; Heinzelman 1980; Mazzotta 1979:190 and Mazzotta, 1972:64-81; Murray 1978:25-80; Sennett 1978:43; Sennett 1980; Serres 1982; Shell 1978; Shell 1980:516-62; Sohn-Rethel 1978; Vance 1979:293-337.

2. Catto 1980:11-14; Cipolla 1956:20-21, 24; Duby 1974:150-52; Garrani 1967:101-106, 139; Le Goff 1977:171-73; Lopez 1976:63-70; Martines 1980:7-21, 72-86; Valerani 1915:197-220.

3. Cipolla 1956:24; Bec 1967:20-45.

4. Cipolla 1956:22-24; Lopez 1951:209-34.

5. Politics 1.3.16 /1257b/; in the "Antiqua Translatio" of Aristotle's works, available in the thirteenth century, the relevant passage reads: "But on the contrary some find money a madness-- a convention merely and nothing at all by nature," printed with his commentary on the Politics in Albertus Magnus, ed. Borgnet 1891:8, 49 (emphasis added); see also the fourteenth century French translation by Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de politiques d'Aristote 1.12 (ed. Menut 1970:64).

6. A good illustration (Fleming 1977:77) of this involvement is the elaborate distinction worked out by Francis's successors between ownership (dominium) and simple use (usus):

To `own' property was to possess it in a dimension both legal and personal-- as to own a house .... Use on the other hand is the contingent and insecure relationship with the necessities of life, such as food and clothing and sufficient shelter from the elements, enjoyed not by continuing legal right {243/244} but as charity and Providence might each day provide. The friars were mendicants precisely because they owned nothing, living from day to day only by the `poor man's use' (usus pauperis).

7. Martines 1980:79-84; see, in addition, Dante's own powerful rima no. 96, "Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire," lines 85-126, ed. Barbi (ED 6:667-68); see also Peck 1980: 21-22, 29, 46, 72, 92-95.

8. Little 1978:36; Huizinga 1954:27-28.

9. Ed. Meiser 1880:32, lines 5-32, and 33, lines 1-2. If Boethius provides, so to speak, philosophical authority for the analogy, Horace provides, again so to speak, poetic authority: "It has always been accepted, and always will be, that words stamped with the mint-mark of the day should be brought into currency." Ars poetica, lines 57-59 (trans. Dorsch 1965:81); see also the commentary and further examples in Weinrich 1958:508-21.

10. Ethics E 1133a-b; for Grosseteste's version, see Kubel 1968-72:344-45; for Oresme's version, Le Livre de éthiques d'Aristote 5.11 (ed. Menut 1940:297).

11. This position would have scandalized some medieval theorists--Thomas Aquinas, for example, who held that money is a measure and that "thus formally considered, /it/ is conceived as having one constant, fixed value--its legal face value." Noonan 1957:52. And yet, in the very defense of such a thesis, Nicole Oresme, a seminal economic theorist of the fourteenth century, will bear witness to its antithesis, or the position which I have just stated. See his De moneta, trans. Johnson 1956:12-23.

12. I am not a Marxist, but like any other educated person, I am aware of Marx and of his incontestable importance for modern thought, especially in his reflections on money, some of which bear quotation here as part of the introduction to this book (Ed. Struick 1964:168-69):

Being the external, common medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society), money transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract conceits and therefore imperfections--into tormenting chimeras--just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras--essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual--into real powers and faculties .... it is the general confounding and compounding of all things--the world upside-down /a particularly Chaucerian observation, I might suggest/ -- the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities.... It makes contradictions embrace.

13. On the status of the ideal in Chaucer's poetry, consult Mann (1973:197), who gives a lucid and accurate description of a poetry which wishes to preserve the ideal without falsifying any of the complexity, good and bad, of human kind. The aim of my book, joining hers at this point, is to describe how Chaucer preserves the ideal intact even as it breaks into so many particular versions of itself.

14. See Derrida 1976:10-18: "The Signifier and Truth"; Lentricchia 1980:168-77.

15. Silverman 1953:329-36; McGalliard 1975:14-15; Fisher 1982:94-152.

16. See lines 1226, 1259, 1288, 1304, 1329, 1333, 1337 var., 1339, 1447, 1450, 1454, 1469, 1472, 1554, 1577, 1599; and consult Fisher 1965:168-70.