SOURCE: Thomas, Keith. “Wrapping It Up.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (21 December 2000): 69-72.

In the following essay, Thomas contends that Davis has shed light on personal relationships in sixteenth-century France with her study of gift-giving—The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France—but because the work is brief, feels that readers are left with unanswered questions.

1.

The idea that human beings are held together by the exchange of gifts is forever associated with the name of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), nephew of Émile Durkheim and author of Essai sur le don, forme archaïque de l'échange (1925).¹ In that brief but pregnant sketch, Mauss showed how the people of the South Seas, the Pacific Northwest, and other “archaic” societies transferred many goods and services to each other by gift, rather than by commercial contracts. Those gifts purported to be free and voluntary, but were in fact obligatory. A strict code...