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Debt and Form in the Middle English Charter Lyrics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2024
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.
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