Introduction

In classic gift theory, the most central gift of all is the woman, given by men in marriage exchanges. in theory, women would play the same symbolic role as other gifts – being symbolic rewards for internally-driven accomplishments, as well as symbols of ties between men. In The Song of Roland, Oliver essentially treats his sister Aude this way in his dealings with Roland. As a corollary to this claim, the most central danger in a classical gift economy would be that men would begin to desire women themselves, and to be diverted from their masculine-oriented world of symbolic relationships and accomplishments. The woman would move from object to subject, and men's actions would become motivated by externally-oriented desires.

This description is really a simplistic caricature of classic gift theory. Recent studies have shown the many failures of this simplistic model to explain social process adequately (Barraud et al. 1994:102–3; Gregory 1982:33, 63; Strathern 1988), and medievalists have likewise pointed out the ways in which the exchange of women is much more problematic than such theories would suggest, especially in that the women are hardly passive objects, but rather socially active subjects themselves (Kay 1995:15ff). But the caricature has a long history, not just in recent anthropological theory, but in the broader theories of culture expounded in some Western literature. In particular, medieval epics of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries presented – or at least attempted to present to their audience – just such a reading of the world of courtliness and the world of the romance genre.