KATE CRASSONS. The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England.

Abstract

Everyone interested in how literature represents bodily need and economic relations should read this probing study of the epistemology of poverty in English narratives, plays and reformist prose from the 1370s through the fifteenth century. It provides, at once, a discriminating synthesis of scholarship on the topic (albeit with overlong quotations at times), probing studies of cultural keywords like ‘need’ and ‘poor men’, and subtle close readings of pivotal episodes that run the gamut of that highly flexible medieval category: poverty. The Claims of Poverty aims at nothing less than helping to remedy the invisibility of poverty in our time ‘by making readers conscious of the ways in which ideology can function to obscure the varied and intricate claims of poverty’, advancing ‘a particular social imaginary often at odds with material reality’ (p. 20). Big-hearted and rigorous, this debut book works hard to achieve that aim, not least of all in the epilogue, where Crassons places medieval debates alongside Barbara Ehrenreich’s popular but much-criticized Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in Contemporary America (2001). (It seems something of a stretch even to consider whether Ehrenreich’s 3 months of low-wage labour may be an act of voluntary poverty, but other parallels stir thought about rival claims about poverty, contemporary and medieval.) Throughout, Crassons argues persuasively that, as medieval texts explore competing ideologies of poverty (I wished for a firm definition of ‘ideology’), they demand that readers interpret ‘the signs of poverty and assess their ethical implications’ (p. 13). For literature, as a form of representation, is central to the study of poverty: both demand interpretation of signs, verbal and material.