The study of gift-giving practices has undergone a revival and transformation during the past decades, due in no small part to the initiatives of the group of scholars in sociology, economics, and anthropology gathered around the Revue du M.A.U.S.S. published in Paris (the abbreviation--a pun on Marcel Mauss's name--stands for "mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales"). Recent work on the gift has advanced on a number of different but often overlapping fronts. One, inspired by the work of Alain Testart, has drawn a sharp distinction between "gift" and "exchange": to give is not the same as "to make a gift." Another, drawing its inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, has attempted to broaden our understanding of what reciprocity means for the subtle orchestration of power relations between donor and receiver of gifts and counter-gifts. While containing a dim reflection of the latter (Pierre Bourdieu is mentioned only once in the conclusion), the book makes no mention of the former approach. This is regrettable, given the interest many of the contributing authors have in what Testart called "transfers of the third type" (t3t).
The volume edited by Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre, the product of a series of meetings of the so-called "Bucknell (now Woolstone) group" responsible for the Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages volume published in 1995, focuses on the relationship between gift- giving practices and the "languages of gift." Declaring herself dissatisfied with a large body of literature discussing the "rules" of gift exchange and proposing models, Janet Nelson sets out in an excellent (and admirably brief) introduction to provide a comparative framework for what amounts, after all, to an attempt to test those models "by listening very closely to the people who 'speak' through our sources" (17). Watching gift-giving practices, she says, is watching "rules sliding into process." The evidence examined in this book clearly shows that the "languages of gift" varied far more, and were also much more expressive, than any of the proposed models would predict. However, Nelson warns readers that the book "is not about semantics[...], for language as understood is not just a matter of words, but of tone and register of discourses, and of concepts conveyed" (6).
Nelson's collaborators flesh out this general picture, taking care to emphasize the factors that made for successful or unsuccessful use of the "languages of gift." We learn that the language of gift was very unstable when applied to offertory. In a paper entitled "Giving to God in the Mass. The experience of the Offertory" (18-32), David Ganz is particularly concerned with the "link between earthly offerings and their power to secure heavenly gifts" (25) To put it simply, according to Ganz, early medieval Christians expected the counter-gift of salvation for their offer of communion gifts. Citing the Gelasian Sacramentaries, Ganz sees the "dealings with God" as an exchange of offerings for the remission of sins. Of all papers in this volume, Ganz's could have without any doubt taken advantage of Alain Testart's work, especially because of the relatively large variety of terms used to describe the supposed gift exchange mediated by the offertory. The Gregorian Sacramentary, for example, mentions sancta commertia by which sins may be forgiven, but in the evidence presented by Ganz there is no explicit instance of "dealing with God." Moreover, when Augustine referred to Christ as the merchant who bought us and the Gospel as a title deed, the echo of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians (6:20: "you were bought at a price") must have been recognizable to the bishop's audience as a direct reference to trade, not gift giving. Even more problematic, in my opinion, is the idea of treating the oblation presented to God from His own fruit-bearing earth as a "gift." Ganz does not explain why those "gifts" are after all called an offering, and does not seem to grasp the logic of those whom Walafrid Strabo scolded for leaving the Mass after hastily making the offering. In the minds of those people, the Holy Communion was clearly about partaking, not reciprocity. They saw no real meaning in the former, which is why they preferred to leave, and regarded the offering not as a gift, but most likely as a "transfer of the third type." It remains unclear what, if any, was the specific context in which words such as "offer," "gift" and "commerce" were understood as different from each other. Why could offerings become a source of income when only bread or wine, and only one offering per person were acceptable? Leslie Brubaker's chapter on gifts and prayers ("The visualization of gift giving in Byzantium and the mosaics at Hagia Sophia," 33-61) equally regards the donation of a book (the Bible) depicted in the tenth-century Leo Bible now in the Vatican as a gift to the Virgin in exchange for the remission of sins, as a counter-gift (34-35). Are we then to understand that Leo commissioned the production of a book to be read by the Virgin? Could this really be reciprocity in action? What would the Virgin do, after all, with Leo's Bible? Is it possible that the Byzantines had no notion of grace? Did they, like Christians in Western Europe during the Carolingian age, have only a utilitarian approach to God? In my opinion, to speak of "visualization of countergift giving" (40) in this context is misleading. Instead, much like in David Ganz's discussion of the offertory, the "gifts" in question are offerings. The ambiguity of both written and visual languages of the gift should not translate into conceptual uncertainties for the scholar studying the gift phenomenon in the medieval past.
Such uncertainties are responsible for some questionable interpretations advanced in Brubaker's paper. According to her the scene of an adult and a child moving towards St. Demetrius in a mosaic in the Church of St. Demetrius in Thessaloniki represents a child oblation: "If the mosaics portray a parent presenting a child in hope of healing, the gift (the mosaic) comes with the very clear hope of a response (the healing); if the mosaics are ex votos) thanking Demetrios for healing the donor's child, they are just as clearly countergifts themselves" (42). Leaving aside the fact that, in the absence of any identifying inscriptions, it is impossible to tell whether the adult gently pushing the child by the shoulders towards St. Demetrius is indeed that child's parent, how does Leslie Brubaker know that the one who commissioned the mosaic is the parent presenting the child to the saint? Why could the mosaic not be an exemplary case (and thus removed from the specifics of a particular person at a particular time) to be used for the edification of the faithful gathered in the church?
Paul Fouracre presents a comprehensive survey of how the term beneficium was used in Frankish sources. The subtitle of his paper is "A society based on favours?" (62-88). Unlike Ganz and Brubaker, Fouracre carefully draws a distinction between favor and gift (62). He also seems inclined to believe that "in charters to donations to churches, the spiritual reward is what historians often imagine was the countergift" (67; emphasis added). In what is perhaps the best paper in the entire volume, Fouracre therefore draws a very important conclusion: beneficium evoked reciprocity, and "reciprocity in turn served to inject a sense of trust into personal relations and social transactions" (87). However, important areas of the Frankish society--justice, office, and the delegation of authority--had nothing to do with "favors." Class-structured and gendered male at the same time, beneficium served to buoy up relatively weak institutions by responding to the need to give without alienation, "in order to maintain the recipient in a state of endless reciprocation" (88).
In his paper, "The gifts of Wearmouth and Jarrow" (89-115), Ian Wood even observes that "reciprocity was something that was recognized and also looked upon with some apprehension, because it could put one under considerable obligation" (107). Ceolfrid's keeping secret his intention to go to Rome was apparently because he did not want to be obligated to respond in kind (or even be more generous) to gifts that his friends or men of importance would have immediately made to him upon learning about his plans. In other words, Ceolfrid did not want to be indebted to anyone. One is reminded here of Pierre Bourdieu's emphasis on reciprocity as a canvas for political games.
Janet Nelson reaches a similar conclusion in a chapter entitled "The settings of the gift in the reign of Charlemagne" (116-148). Some of the gifts in her evidence were coercive, "signs of the donor's overwhelming power as sometimes in Charlemagne's case" (146). Here as well, a conceptual distinction between gifts and offerings (such as Christmas and Eastern offerings to local lords, of honey and wine, stuffed breads, and poultry). Given the absence of any reciprocity, the latter are more like Testart's "transfers of the third type."
Diplomatic gifts feature prominently in Ann Christys's chapter, "The queen of the Franks offers gifts to the caliph al-Muktafi'" (149-170). Perhaps the most interesting conclusion of this excellent analysis of a completely invented episode in the adab ("belles letters) literature is that the word hadaya was specifically used to refer to diplomatic gifts to be distinguished from gifts in general, for which the legal term hiba was preferred. The hadiyya supposedly sent by the queen of the Franks to the caliph implied reciprocity, whereas hiba is a gift from a higher to a lower position in society. The apparent specialization of the language of gift in Muslim society invites a much broader investigation in gift-giving practices than has been possible in this chapter.
In "Reciprocal gifts on Mount Athos in the tenth and eleventh century" (171-192) Rosemary Morris identifies a Roman legal subtext in many documents pertaining to donations and gifts inter vivos. That context is also apparent in the case of the "Compulsory gift exchange in Lombard Italy, 650-1150" (193-216), a chapter in which Chris Wickham examines a specifically Lombard concept called launegild, which meant "a compulsory countergift, without which a gift was invalid, and could be revoked" (194). Given the compulsory nature of that countergift, one wonders if the phenomenon in question could not be described better as "exchange" than "gift giving." Wickham actually notes that in late eleventh-century Milan, tenants "were expected not to sell tenures, so they resorted to what could be called a 'quasi-sale' gift exchange instead, gift with such a large countergift that the value of that gift was an important part of the transaction" (206; emphasis added).
Similar concerns about the conceptual distinction between commerce, exchange, and gift(-giving) are raised by Wendy Davies's chapter "When gift is sale. Reciprocities and commodities in tenth-century Christian Iberia" (217-237). Davies maintains that phrases such as scripture concessionis or facimus kartam used in tenth-century transactions recorded in the cartulary of the monastery of Celanova reveal "the language of gift" (225). This reviewer remains unconvinced.
Another invaluable and welcome contribution is the conclusion written by Chris Wickham "on behalf of the contributors" (238-261). "Why were there so many words for gift, and for giving, in the early Middle Ages?" asks Wickham. "Because gift giving was always complicated, always strategic, always risky, always potentially ambiguous, with meanings that could be attached and competed over both at the moment of giving and later" (261). Another possibility, barely explored in this volume, is that different forms of transactions and prestations, from gift-giving to "transfers of the third type" were not mutually exclusive and that people in the early Middle Ages were just as capable of hiding their true intentions under supposedly neutral or generous language as modern people are.
Ultimately, The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages is an uncommon work of scholarship that bridges several complex, but related areas of inquiry. Experts on European early medieval history as well as scholars in political anthropology and the sociology of gift giving will find this work essential reading. Davies, Fouracre, and their collaborators are to be congratulated for the intellectual rigor and the sharp focus of this volume. This is a model of what a collaborative historical enterprise should be. In a collection concerned to capture how historical change occurred through several centuries and geographical areas of Europe, the comprehensive coverage of individual issues is particularly welcome. The unrelenting insistence on the failure of existing models of gift-giving to account for the bewildering variety of phenomena in the early Middle Ages would also be more convincing if the authors showed the strengths of those models as well as persistently dwelling on their weaknesses and failures. Still, the mass of evidence presented and so skillfully analyzed here goes far toward advancing a new model, one in which types of transactions and prestations until now kept separate for heuristic purposes appear in multiple combinations to suit particular social and political goals. Rather than an ending, this book therefore represents a new starting point for further research in gift giving practices and the languages used to describe them.