| Whether condemned as a form of blasphemy, thought through as a way of examining the boundaries of Christian society, or recuperated as an allegory for the superabundant relation of grace to human effort, usury is writ large across the intellectual culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This study suggests that usury also has an important place in medieval French literature, not as a practice to be represented, but as a practice of representation. In a first chapter, I will examine how Chretien de Troyes's Yvain encodes usury as a way of testing claims made for text and narrative as vehicles of meaning and social order. In a second chapter, I argue that literary representations of the usurer as an arbiter of value speak to thirteenth-century ecclesiastical anxieties about the inescapability of credit and about the problem of complicity between moralists who borrowed and the lenders they condemned. Usury, associated at once with greed, blasphemy, and fraud, offers new ways of reading the fabliaux, even when money lending is not explicitly articulated as theme. In a final chapter, I investigate a literary and philosophical tradition associating usury with a deformation of linear genealogical structures. The principal locus of this analysis is Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, where I examine the false monk Faux Semblant, who preys on usurers, as a figure of counterfeit linked to the evolving economic spaces of the thirteenth-century city. These analyses offer new directions for exploring the deep affinity between literature and economic culture in the French Middle Ages. |
