Chapter 5 considers the ways in which Piers Plowman attempts to translate a Franciscan form-of-life into vernacular, worldly terms. While the Franciscan forma vitae details the way of living for each brother, from his clothing to his daily activities to the correction of his faults, Piers Plowman details the means of making a living in an inappropriable world. I argue that the poem asks these questions by way of its sustained meditation on the meaning and nature of labour as the continual payment of an unpayable debt. Langland explores the value and meaning of labour most explicitly in and through the three figures in the poem who are most closely linked with Franciscanism, and who court most dangerously the charges of idleness and default: Rechelesnesse, Nede, and the Dreamer himself. As this chapter shows, the irreducibly ambiguous nature of these three figures, who mix truth with half-truth and misunderstanding, who aspire to the ideals taught by Holy Church, Patience, Kynde, and Conscience, but who embody an all-too-human failure to attain them, encapsulates the poem’s interpretive inappropriability.

Many readers have seen Piers Plowman as a poem of crisis, a poem that fractures under the weight of its own ambivalence. I argue here that the demonic ambiguity of debt offers a plausible explanation of the conflicting impulses at work in this text. For Langland, monetary exchange, along with the careful accounting practices it demands, as long as it is conducted honestly and fairly, serves as a metaphor of penitential exchange, not paradoxically, not in spite of its corrupting power, but because it is conducive to balance and order, to the practice of virtue and the ethical habits of self-regulation required for true and effective penance. On the other hand, for Langland, the unpayable and infinitely reproducible nature of debt, manifest precisely in the ascesis instituted by grace, produces a troubling limitlessness. The ascesis of debt is, in this way, self-undermining. The debt that cannot be repaid correlates to needs that cannot be measured, and thus to desires that cannot be checked and boundaries that cannot be known.

The Introduction defines debt as a financial tool and as a theological concept, summarizing the role of debt in the late medieval English economy and in the sacrament of penance. This dual definition challenges the “separate spheres” interpretive paradigm that dominates literary history. A paradigm in which economics and theology are constitutive of two ideally separate modes, this dominant interpretive approach frames the shift from feudalism to capitalism as a shift from the traditional bonds of hierarchy and communalism to modern individualism and competitive acquisition. Understanding capitalism as an economy of debt makes possible a new perspective on economic change in late medieval England, one that revises Weber’s spirit of capitalism and challenges Weberian periodisation. The image of God as a bookkeeper and the concomitant understanding of sin as a debt that cannot be fully discharged is first elaborated and disseminated en masse in the late medieval flowering of vernacular literature in England and in Europe. This, I argue, is the cultural site where the systematization of the ethical conduct of life is imagined for the first time not only as a possibility for all people, but as a requirement.

I argue in Chapter 3 that the canon law precept of the marriage debt, which was formulated particularly by Augustine, Gratian, and Thomas Aquinas in the course of establishing marriage as a sacrament, indicates a mode by which power is exercised on and through the bodies and the wills of married parties. It is a mode by which individuals are enjoined to a voluntary subservience. The power that the loathly lady figure wields over the penitent knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale leaves its subject formally free but freely compliant, aiming at the production of internal conditions rather than external constraints. The same dynamic shapes the plots of other medieval texts featuring the marriage debt, from Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale to the tales told on Days 2 and 8 of Boccaccio’s Decameron, all of which I consider as illustrative analogues. These texts identify marriage, and marital sex in particular, as a key site where debt makes subjects, where political power is enacted in and through the free wills of human beings.

Chapter 2 reads the late medieval romance of the spendthrift knight as an exemplum of economic faith. A character borrowed from folklore, the spendthrift knight falls into debt through excessive largesse, and consequently into exile from the aristocratic community. The plot of the spendthrift romance is organized around the protagonist’s debt recovery and eventual social triumph when newfound wealth allows him to reclaim the status he lost through penury. I argue that what makes these romances amenable to and generative of commercial values is their valorization of credit, typically expressed in the narratives as honour, trouthe, and faithfulness. Such faithfulness is manifest primarily in a willingness to take economic risks, variously extending and accepting credit, in cycles of exchange that end up generating profit for the knight and for his community. Belief as such in relations of social and material exchange, belief that defies strict rationality and that makes risk and sacrifice both possible and profitable, motivates gifts and market transactions alike, and binds individuals in creditor–debtor relationships that are both reciprocal and hierarchical.

In this book, I have shown some of the ways in which the penitential and sacramental theology of the later Middle Ages was not resistant to emerging capitalist forms and principles but rather contributed to their emergence, and I have argued that we can identify in medieval theology a distinctly capitalist spirit. This spirit is expressed precisely in those aspects of the “age of faith” that have usually been read as inimical to the market and to the rationalizing, secularizing forces of modernity. Belief in the incarnated Christ is a kind of monetary belief, even as the Redemption is an economic exchange that cannot be reduced to mere metaphor; likewise, the faith and trust on which financial credit relies are aspects of a non-rational, essentially religious belief in the trustworthiness of creditor and debtor alike. The sacramental theology of marriage, encapsulated in the marriage debt, seeks to govern desire in the domestic economy by producing self-governing subjects, subjects who, as Weber and Foucault would remind us, are the prerequisites of capitalism. The penitential practices required to measure vices and virtues, practices taught and modelled by penitential handbooks and by Piers Plowman, suggest the kind of rational, methodical conduct of life that Weber identified with Protestant ascesis, although Langland’s emphasis falls on the paradox of sin as a debt that must be paid but that cannot be paid. Langland’s attempt to imagine a Franciscan form of life in the general economy leads to his affirmation of common use; the final images of Christian communal life in the poem are images of a Pentecostal bureaucracy of labourers who manage the gifts and resources lent by God. In Piers Plowman, Langland makes the case for a monetized, bureaucratized social structure precisely in his desire to eschew covetous materialism. All of these texts exemplify the ways in which theological ideas can shape economic structures and realities; more specifically, they suggest ways in which capitalism as an economy of debt shares conceptual ground with the penitential economy of debt.

Chapter 1 uses the Middle English Charters of Christ to outline a medieval theory of money as debt. The charter lyrics pretend to be deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the community’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction.