Networking Froissart’s Florin

Abstract

ABSTRACTJean Froissart’s 1389 Dit du florin stages a dialogue between a penurious poet-narrator and the single, misshapen coin remaining at the bottom of his otherwise empty purse. Described as clipped, disfigured, and broken, the coin is now worthless: paradoxically, its former value lay at its now-missing periphery, not at its center. The florin nonetheless offers a faithful accounting of the narrator’s expenditures, and ultimately binds the poet in a network of patrons that might restore his lost wealth. This article considers the Dit du florin’s unusual positioning of value, knowledge, and power at the margins of things — at the geographic boundaries the poet skirts in his travels, in the seams of a purse, in the clippings of a coin — and this in a text that is itself situated at the margins of Froissart’s oeuvre. Viewing the florin through the lens of Actor-Network Theory and Disability Studies, we uncover how the Dit’s gestures of accounting and recounting implicate the poet and the coin in complex networks of liquid social exchange.