Leithart
Andrew Galloway traces the development of explicit discussions of gratitude in a 1994 article from the Journal of the History of Ideas. A few highlights:
1) Though he admits that gratitude was not “‘invented’ at some moment in human culture,” and that it was “the basis for social and religious ties in much of the ‘gift economy’ of the early Middle Ages.” Yet, “gratitude only slowly emerges as an explicit concern. By the late fourteenth century . . . it develops into forms that play a significant role in views of social ties and society as a whole.”
2) In the background of later medieval discussions of gratitude was the earlier use of gift exchange as a mechanism for social and political cohesion. He cites a study arguing “that at least up to the seventh century, gifts constitute a substantial portion of the total wealth circulated in western Europe.” References to the practice and ethics of gift-giving stretch into the fifteenth century: “William of Malmesbury reports that King William Rufus overplays this convention until he is so poor that he turns to pillaging the church and other sources,” and Malmesbury goes on to distinguish the king’s “prodigality” from the virtue of “liberality.” Geoffrey of Monmouth records that Arthur followed a similar pattern of prodigality at the time of his coronation.
3) Medieval references to gift-giving “tend to locate the practice more specifically in aristocratic and royal contexts, or cast a more cynical eye on its operations. In Amis’s speech in the late-thirteenth-century portion of the Roman de la Rose, for instance, a brief bit of advice from Ovid on the general power of gifts to win supporters becomes a claim that gift-giving exalts the reputation of the giver while it lowers the freedom and power of the recipient.” de Lorris writes, “Gifts give praise to the givers/ and put those who take in a worse light, for gifts put their natural freedom/ under obligation to serve another. What shall I say? In sum,/ both gods and men are captured by gifts.”
4) By the late 13th century, “more egalitarian and newly exhorted notions of economic exchange and social reciprocity” had developed into explicit discussions of gratitude, so that “the extent of the new interest in gratitude as a principle for an economy is striking.” The word “gratitudo” is itself a coinage of the scholastics, and was unknown to earlier Christian writers, who, on the occasions that they discuss human obligation, use “gratia” instead. Aquinas was a key figure in this development, and his work on gratitude from the ST was distributed in the Speculum morale .
5) Vincent of Beauvais, an encyclopedist of the 13th century, defines gratitudo as “the virtue by which we recognize and remunerate any benefits given us,” and argues that gifts must be repayed “cum usura” or else they display “ingrati.” He goes so far as to claim that it is fraud to accept without the possibility of repayment: “fraus est accipere, quod non possis reddere.” This does not mean that the scholastics condoned actual usury, which was usualled condemned as an offense against charity. Gratitudo was “a metaphorical ‘surplus’ or category of profit even in loans of money where monetary profit was officially condemned as it was not in other kinds of exchange.”
6) During the later Middle Ages, gratitudo first competes with and then displaces gift-giving, as “formulas and proverbs of the one slowly replace those of the other.” The motivation for giving is gratitude for God and others. An English Dominican of the fourteenth century, Johannes de Bromyard, says that “avarice is accompanied not only by such disturbance in relation to oneself but also by ingratitude in relation to God and to one’s family and friends.” Gratitude is natural, and all ingratitude violates natural order. Even flowers take in the rays of the sun and “render back bright colors and scent.”
7) In late medieval English (such as Wyclif’s Bible), “gratus” and “ingratus” are normally rendered as “kynde” and “unkynde,” thus emphasizing the natural bases for gratitude, since the word also means “natural” and “kin.” This linkage provided fodder for medieval English poets, for whom “the double-entendre of both the ‘natural’ and the ‘moral’ meanings of ‘kindenesse’ must rank among the favorite verbal games of Middle English religious writers.” In a poem entitled “God’s Complaint,” the poet commemorates events from redemptive history and asks “Why artow to thi Lord vnkynde?” listing as appropriate “kindnesses” the duty to “thanke,” as well as to obey and worship. John Gower wrote, “The ingrate who thus denatures himself/ is worse than a dog in his nature/ for a dog, alive or dead,/ loves and defends its lord to its ability,/ but the ungrateful man at no time/ carries love or loyalty to you . . . ./ Wherefore the ungrateful man is such/ that he is called ‘unnatural.’”
8) These links also “shifts religious and social bonds away from hierarchy and toward affinity, and the exploitation of these lexical possibilities may easily be aligned with the many distinctive late-medieval forms of community or corporate identity in which reciprocation and close affinity or ideas of such affinity cohere” – institutions including guilds, chantries, and other quasi-familial arrangements.
9) Galloway notes that Gower implies that “a historical decrease of social trust spurred the need to emphasize the ethic” of gratitude, a response to the increasingly segregated social order of late medieval England: “The principle of gratitude finally invoked is the only hope for harmony between the disparate social realms of country, city, and court that Gower contemplates.”
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