Negotiating the Gift

Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange

Edited by

Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner and Bernhard Jussen

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Contents

Pref (munus)ace
GADI ALGAZI

Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts

EGON FLAIG

Is Loyalty a Favor? or: Why Gifts cannot oblige an Emperor

STEPHEN D. WHITE

29

Service for Fiefs or Fiefs for Service: The Politics of Reciprocity

GADI ALGAZI

63

Feigned Reciprocities: Lords, Peasants, and the Afterlife of Late Medieval Social Strategies
PATRICK J. GEARY

99

Gift Exchange and Social Science Modeling: The Limitations of a Construct 129
BEATE WAGNER-HASEL

Egoistic Exchange and Altruistic Gift: On the Roots of Marcel Mauss' Theory of the Gift
BERNHARD JUSSEN

141

Religious Discourses of the Gift in the Middle Ages: Semantic Evidences (Second to Twelfth Centuries)
LUDOLF KUCHENBUCH

173

Forms donativus: Language Use and Gifting in Seigneurial Records between the Eighth and the Twelfth Centuries 193
VALENTIN GROEBNER

The City Guard's Salute: Legal and Illegal, Public and Private Gifts in the Swiss Confederation around 1500

247

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ELIANA MAGNANI S.-CHRISTEN

Contents

Transforming Things and Persons: The Gift pro anima in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries 269

GABRIELA SIGNORI

Family Traditions: Moral Economy and Memorial Gift Exchange* in the Urban World of the Late Fifteenth-Century

285

ALEXANDER NAGEL

Art as Gift: Liberal Art and Religious Reform in the Renaissance

319

BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN

Francia and Polynesia: Rethinking Anthropological Approaches

361

MICHAEL HARBSMEIER

Gifts and Discoveries: Gift Exchange in Early Modern Narratives of Exploration and Discovery

381

Index

411