At Home with Mammon: Matter, Money, and Memory in Book II of The Faerie Queene

Abstract

At Home with Mammon:Matter, Money, and Memory in Book II of The Faerie Queene David Landreth This essay charts the definition of early modern selfhood as the history of individuals' interactions with material objects, taking as its instance an enduringly strange meditation on the temporality of matter and of value: Edmund Spenser's Cave of Mammon episode in book two, canto seven of The Faerie Queene. Its method is to examine the momentary, constantly-elided difference between precious metals and money as a narrative phenomenon that converges with, and contests, the embodiment of memory. Reading from the Aristotelian dichotomy between materia, undifferentiated substance, and forma, the individuating realization of objects in the world, I argue that the coin is at once only one of many forms available to the matter of silver and gold, and at the same time the apparent destiny of the metals' value. Value itself, however, is the category that eliminates the individuation of unique objects in the world, by making them exchangeable for coins. The story of the coin, then, is a reiterative enactment of two opposite teleological narratives upon the same golden stuff, the specifying destiny of form and the equivalencing destiny of value: thus it is that the figure of the miser obscenely apes the real processes of exchange without ever allowing his gold to leave his house, as he enacts the momentary differentiation of units within the wasteful mass of his hoard, simply by "telling" them over and over. Though the Christian dispensation at moments offers a clear-cut escape, into asceticism, from service to both God and Mammon, this text deliberately limits its frame of Christian reference, for Sir Guyon espouses only a pagan virtue in this canto.1 Spenser is more interested here in how—or indeed whether—the malleability and the fungibility of silver and gold may be circumscribed within the world of matter and sense. Sir Guyon looks to the most remote reaches of past imagination, the Ovidian Golden Age, to remember a world without Mammon, but finds that he has only brought Mammon back with him: Mammon's destiny is a temporal process, but an anachronistic [End Page 245] one, which tells itself backwards and makes the past into the terms of Mammon's futurity. Spenser instead posits the limit of money's power to transform through exchange at the human mouth: what gold can only fail to be is food. The temperate self embodied in Alma's castle is as nourished by memory as it is by supper: the books that Guyon and Arthur read there are objects that sustain the knights' self-definition, the antitheses of coined gold, whose fragile pages defy Mammon's perennial attempt to reduce the matter of history to the indifference of monetary exchange. I. On Stuff According to the Doctor who guides the dialogue in the 1549 Discourse of the Commonweal,precious metals are uniquely suited to take on the form of coinage. Leather, although likewise durable, divisible, and capable of bearing a stamp, cannot be substituted for silver and gold in the circulating medium, for, lacking the rarity that confers universal value upon the precious metals, its currency will extend only so far as the credit of the prince who has stamped it; while precious stones, although even scarcer than gold, cannot easily be divided, much less marked by authority, and their value relative to one another is impossible for anyone but an expert to determine.2 Conversely, although silver and gold can take on a limitless variety of other forms, only when their circulation is licensed, and their weight and fineness guaranteed, by the authority of the stamp, do they assume all the functions of money. The Aristotelian sense of materia as a potentiality, and of change in form as a teleological motion realizing that potentiality, is most readily available to understanding in terms of the metals, which must each be liquified into undifferentiated matter—some iron, silver, or tin—before they take on any of the myriad forms in which solid iron, tin, or silver might find a use, and to which they lose their identity as stuff: now an iron hoe, a silver coin, a tin...

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