Focused on the “belated romances” (vii) written in Middle English from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Savage Economy responds to a disarmingly simple question: “Why does romance … keep coming back in late medieval England?” (15). A pun in the subtitle of the work points us in the direction of Wadiak’s answer: throughout the text, return signifies both payment (in the case of “returns”) and coming back (the “return” of romance). Building off Bourdieu’s understanding of return, Wadiak suggests that in these romances “return” is actually “a metaphor for what is really a kind of submerged continuity” (14). The central contention is that Middle English romance longs for a return to chivalric orders built on performing specific kinds of symbolic violence, and that this genre carries these chivalric values into the commercial, bourgeois world of the early modern era.

Wadiak’s work directly engages gift theory and understandings of symbolic violence, particularly the work of Cowell, Bordieu, and Mauss (who is cited frequently), suggesting that modern commercial exchanges retain traces of the violence implicit in chivalric gift economies. In the chivalric economy, the receiver of the gift is indebted to the giver, and gift exchanges are always sublimated battles. Insofar as gifts prompt a “return,” they are less distinct from modern economies of exchange than they may initially appear. If the line between gift and exchange is permeable, then the violence inherent in gift economies is de facto present in modern commercial exchange, as Wadiak argues throughout the book. This argument neatly bridges the gap between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and Wadiak’s readings are helpful for scholars who are interested in the persistence of medieval forms and ideas in early modernity; Wadiak suggests that late medieval romance already is aware that the modern order is emerging, even as it longs for an older order.

One weakness of Savage Economy is its relatively small attention to substantiating claims made about original audiences. The study often makes strong claims about the readers and auditors of these works in terms of their socioeconomic status or their specific reactions to patterns of violence, gift, and exchange. These claims usually rest on single, short citations, and are developed, at most, only over a few paragraphs (as in 116–17). Greater attention to surviving manuscript and incunabular copies, and to patterns of circulation and annotation, would have established Wadiak’s case more solidly. An example of a possible misreading caused by this approach is the assertion that the “Amen” and “hony soyt qui mal pence” (the motto of the Order of the Garter) at the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were written by the same scribe as the text (93, 105); in fact, they are larger than the text, in a possibly different hand, and thus potentially later additions (see the University of Calgary’s Cotton Nero A.x Project: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/cotton/index.html).

When Wadiak applies his critical apparatus to specific literary texts, however, the results are generally satisfying and insightful. The book ranges over a wide swath of material, from some of the earliest Middle English romances and the “Spendthrift Knight” subgenre (chapter 2, “The Gift and Its Returns”), to the blending of romance and ballad in fifteenth-century outlaw tales (chapter 5, “What Shall These Bowes Do?”). Wadiak’s reading of “The Knight’s Tale” brings a fresh perspective to the text, though his claim about the centrality of romance to Chaucer’s poetics is not quite convincing, given the wide variety of genres important to Chaucer (chapter 3, “Chaucerian Capital”). Perhaps the strongest chapter treats the romances of Gawain, not merely Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but also the later Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle and The Turke and Sir Gawain. Wadiak’s theoretical model works exceptionally well with these texts, and illuminates the complexities of new and old models of symbolic violence present in the subgenre of Gawain romances (chapter 4, “Gawain’s ‘Nirt’ and the Sign of Chivalry”). Ultimately, Savage Economy is a fine contribution to understanding the intersections of violence and political economy in the romances of late medieval England, as well as suggesting these as reasons for the persistence of romance and medieval nostalgia in the early modern era.