Diane Cady has been working on the intersection of economics and gender in late-medieval English culture for quite some time; her doctoral dissertation in 2002 laid out some of the main ideas at stake in this book in terms of Chaucer, and subsequent articles, such as "The Gender of Money" (Genders 44, 2006) and "Damaged Goods: Merchandise, Stories and Gender in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale" (New Medieval Literatures 17, 2017) build on the ultimately compelling synthesis of gender and economic theory that she articulates more fully in this monograph. Expanding her focus well beyond her initial work on Chaucer, she covers significant literary ground here, including chapters on the Squire of Low Degree, John Lydgate's Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, Book 5 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and an updating of her article on Geoffrey Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. I particularly appreciated that she managed to incorporate perhaps the most prominent intersection of money and gender in late medieval English literature, Lady Meed in Piers Plowman, into her theoretical overview--this allows her to build on an area where scholars are already familiar with this theoretical territory, without spending the limited space allowed for books in this series rehashing the best-known example of her main point. By using William Langland's personification of Meed as a starting point, which she then complicates somewhat by looking at variations on similar themes in Sir Launfal, she is able to establish a trend, which she effectively pursues in the remaining chapters.

Cady's core theoretical and interpretive point here is the extent to which the developing ideology of money in the middle ages was effectively tied to gendered notions of value and desire; elements of her introduction and her Coda also underline to what extent money and gender remain entangled. The Coda, while perhaps risky in its direct address of politics and invocation of our ongoing culture wars, is highly reminiscent of the final chapter of James A. Brundage's Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, which traces the legal history of that book's main analysis into contemporary American law. Cady's choice to frame her study with the long-term ramifications of understanding money in terms of gender (and vice versa) underlines the very real present-day consequences of the ideological framework revealed by her careful textual analysis throughout. This study is highly "relevant," in the terms that contemporary critics of the humanities so often invoke while eliminating programs and cutting budgets.

At the same time as her overall focus effectively asserts its ongoing relevance, the individual analyses of the focused chapters successfully combine an increasingly complicated understanding of the entanglement of gender and economic ideologies with meaningful advancement of scholarship on those texts. Given the varied degree of past scholarly interest in the different texts on which she focuses, the bibliographical work differs from chapter to chapter. She has more to contend with in the Gower and Chaucer chapters, of course, but all of the chapters engage convincingly with their texts and make a persuasive case for the need to consider the gendering of economic ideology in and around those texts. She also effectively incorporates a number of related areas, like the history of property rights or the rhetoric of travel literature, so that the book actually covers more ground than a simple chapter list would suggest. The chapters, though they do build productively toward a book-length argument, will also excerpt well, which suits the way that scholarly books are so often approached by academic readers.

With the Squire of Low Degree, then, the necrophilic desire within the story overlaps importantly with the erotic and economic desires more typical of romance; her reading then interrogates the significance of blurring those forms of desire. A mark of successful, theoretically sophisticated scholarship is that it approaches the "so-what" question directly, and Cady manages this move admirably throughout the book. The influence of these blurred desires on the questions of political inheritance and social status in the story then brings in the question of "necropolitics" in this chapter's title; both erotic and economic desire in the tale ultimately (or even always already) relate to power. With John Lydgate's Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, Cady's focus shifts to another text outside the usual run of popular subjects of study. She helpfully provides a summary of this story, which Lydgate adapted from Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina Clericalis. Given that the story ultimately follows the friendship between its two male merchants, a friendship that seems to transcend the men's marriages and economic enterprises, it is not a shock that study of this text leads to questions of the boundaries of the erotic in men's friendships, further complicated by the merchants' shared economic desires. She argues that Lydgate may have wanted to "make a point about the way these men are willing to put their fiscal and masculine well-being at risk for one another, a willingness that the poet hints is both economically unsound and sexually queer" (57). She also works effectively with the setting of the story in the Near East, and Lydgate's incorporation of orientalist approaches to Syria and Egypt in his characterization of prodigality and excess. The running theme in her analysis of how Lydgate balances that use of the exotic with a significant increase of the overall Englishness of the story (compared to Petrus Alfonsi's version) also allows her to situate this text more within the broader focus of her book overall. Consistent reference to Chaucer throughout this chapter both provides a touchstone for readers more familiar with Chaucer than with Lydgate, and helps tie the chapters together overall, though it raises the question of why to put the Lydgate

Then with the later chapters on Gower and Chaucer, Cady approaches more familiar scholarly ground, though her work raises questions for the study of both authors that scholars who focus on Gower and Chaucer will need to consider going forward. Indeed, this is another marker of a successful theoretical study: that it changes how its reader will look at texts afterwards. With Gower, her focus on the implementation of the Confessio Amantis'sframe in Book 5 brings a welcome focus to that frame (many Gower scholars, myself included, tend to focus on stories in at least partial isolation, and Cady admirably resists that trend here). The passage in question, a detailed outline of an imagined ideal prelapsarian world of shared goods and its loss to the introduction of avarice and private property (86), has been seen as problematic, but her analysis of how erotic and economic desires and sharing work out in the poem makes sense, for the most part. Contextualizing Gower's thinking leads her to a long intellectual history of the notion of property, from Plato and Aristotle onwards; this adds to our understanding of what Gower is up to, though it is not clear why she needed so energetically to critique a study on the subject by Ernest Barker from 1906. Still, this intellectual background helps explain the contrast between an imagined golden age with physical property held in common, and the complications of such a fantasy in terms of male claims on women. This train of thought on Gower's part leads to an association of possession with "enclosure and protection from others" which "takes on a decidedly disturbing valence when it comes to love" (99). Certainly, the larger project of the Confessio Amantis, which has Genius articulating the seven deadly sins in terms of love, was inevitably going to blur economic and erotic desire in the section on avarice, but Cady here brings that move into a larger intellectual context for the period, without letting Gower off the hook for some of Book 5's creepier moments. She does discuss some of the individual tales here, such as those of Midas and Echo, but overall they are effectively related to her larger point about how Gower is exploring notions of value and desire in blurred economic and erotic terms.

Then with Chaucer, Cady revises a previously-published article, but the study needs this material, even if much of it is available elsewhere. The Man of Law's Tale has been the site of many different interpretations (like the rest of the Canterbury Tales), but Cady here deftly navigates between and responds to a variety of scholars' takes on the tale, and she is able to relate the gendering of economic thought in this tale to the nature of storytelling in the period. Her incorporation of the rhetorical tradition of travel literature is very helpful in its perspective on the linking of such narratives to merchants, and helps make sense of what is happening in this tale's narrative and Chaucer's framing of it. The commodification of Custance works well to illustrate Cady's larger point here about "the economics of storytelling" (139) in terms that underline the book's primary focus. Generally speaking this chapter works well, and her argument can speak for itself, but it does come across as a bit of a distraction that in her address to the Man of Law's opening and the questions of raises of poetic influence, Cady chooses to filter her reading through Harold Bloom's anxiety model before articulating her own significantly more coherent sense of what Chaucer is up to by having the Man of Law explore the problems of telling new stories. Her argument did not really need to push this particular 20th-century theory button. Overall she makes a clear case that, as she puts it, "Chaucer's tale and medieval poetics more broadly are invested in a very particular economy of storytelling, one in which commodification and desire are entwined with ideologies of gender and value" (160).

On the whole the book is well-argued, with thorough research and thoughtful explanations of her broader theoretical thinking. Not every reader will necessarily agree with all of the details, but that is not really the point of this sort of monograph. The blurring and interplay described here between conceptions of economic and erotic value, and the many examples Cady is able to explore, add up to a clear case that this "entwining" of gender and economic ideology needs to be addressed in scholarly work on a broad cross-section of late-medieval English literature. The big picture theoretical work that she is doing goes far to excuse the potential confusion of her chapter order. One measure of the book's success is that a reader who works in this time period will inevitably think of other moments in other texts that make more sense in terms of her model of how ideologies of gender and economic value depend on each other. This book will need to be cited in a lot of critical work going forward, and not just on the texts she includes here. Possible (and perhaps inevitable) quibbles about various specific literary-interpretive points must ultimately yield to a sense of her broader intellectual achievement, and this book should be widely read.