The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England

The gift of narrative in medieval England places medieval narratives in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange. It opens fresh approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages.

The book argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances, through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects of time. Ranging from the twelfth-century Romance of Horn to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Geoffrey Chaucer''s