Gifts versus shopping

Before and during the development of the market economy in the high Middle Ages, a gift culture provided the primary means of receiving new clothes and other objects of distinction such as horses, arms, jewels, and serving ware. Worthy people received new - or often somewhat used - objects as signs of appreciation from superiors. In the Persian-Arab tradition of conferring “robes of honor,” khil’at, items worn by the lord had greater value than anything new.287 In political sirventes poems, epics, and romance prologues of the high Middle Ages, poets propagandized generosity, “largesse,” as Baldwin and others have remarked.288 The present author has theorized that when a gift culture is the sole provider of new objects and ornaments one cannot really speak of a fashion system, because gifted objects of conspicuous consumption do not reflect the personal, self-expressive choices of the wearer, but rather the taste of the superior.289 Fashion systems do not eliminate gift systems. On the contrary, as Jacques Godbout, Mary Douglas, and others have argued in the wake of the anthropological essay on the gift by Marcel Mauss, a gift culture continues to flourish even today, in forms adapted to contemporary society.290 Money does not replace gifts so much as carve out a place for personal consumption alongside hierarchically determined bestowal. In order for a fashion system to come into being, conditions had to be in place that would allow individuals to make their own consumer choices.

Literature played a role in how this shift took place. The text allows an individual or group to fantasize how, if reality were different, they might shop for themselves. Desire for change must be present to cause the actual marketplace to evolve. despite the modern notion that shopping is a biologically feminine activity, the first group positioned to become independent consumers was men. heroes were represented as needing funds to outfit themselves according to their tastes and their social ambitions. romances imagined fantasy strategies for realizing those monetary, and thereby fashionable, needs.