Shakespeare recognized that something new was in the offing, but the actual situation of England and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far more complicated that Timon of Athens suggests. The gift-society to which Timon is attached was not being completely replaced, nor was the market the main culprit in the changes that Shakespeare noticed around him. Such, at least, is the argument of Natalie Zemon Davis in her book on the gift in sixteenth-century France. She points out, for instance, that the gifts and sales coexisted in the sixteenth century, as they do in our day. What proportion of purchases are used purely for the benefit of the purchaser? Parents spend money on food to give to their children, on clothes for the same purpose, on luxury items to give as gifts.

Once bought, goods often continue circulating not by sales but by gift: “Rather than imagining a zero-sum game between gifts and commercial markets,” Davis says, “or even a historic tug of war, we might better conceive of enduring interactions between gift-systems and sale-systems. Certain of these interactions may have curtained gifts, others freed them to go in new directions. Especially important in the sixteenth century was the possibility of moving back and forth between the gift mode and the sale mode, while always remembering the distinction between them.

Intellectual goods, for instance, were seen as common goods. Medievals had insisted that knowledge “cannot be sold,” being a gift from God, and this medieval idea persisted even into the age of publishing: “Book production and sale seemed less ‘mercenary’ than other trades: ‘You practice the most honorable commerce possible in this world,’ said a Lyon notary in a printed letter to an important merchant-publisher in Paris.” A legal dispute in Paris during the 1580s illustrates the point, a dispute involving, appropriately enough, the publication of Seneca’s Works. The book had appeared in 1585, and in the following year a publisher wanted to pint it with “an exclusive six-year privilege for himself.” Two other publishers objected, their lawyer making the argument that “The author of a book is wholly its master, and as such can dispose of it freely, even keeping it always in his own private hands . . . or granting it common liberty . . . holding nothing back . . . or reserving some right of patronage over it, as in saying that no one but him can print it for a certain time.” Since the edition had been released freely, it ought to remain free, and the lawyer charged the publisher with ingratitude: “It is ingratitude to contravene the law of benefit, to ravish this book from the breast of the public, to which it belongs by the munificence of those who produced it, and to arrogate it to oneself privately.” Book publishing was not the only industry where this combination of gift and sale is found. Davis points to teaching and the medical profession as other examples, and also notes that men in royal service received both wages and a variety of extra “dons.”

The gift system of the medieval world was not disrupted, she argues, by the rise of the market, but rather by coercive practices in the family and in politics. Families used wills and inheritance to manipulate children and create “obligation anxiety.” Montaigne expressed the resistance to this anxiety in his essay on vanity. Montaigne expressed this in his essay on Vanity:

“I escape, ‘tis true, but am troubled that it is more by chance, and something of my own prudence, than by justice; and am not satisfied to be out of the protection of the laws, and under any other safeguard than theirs. As matters stand, I live, above one half, by the favors of others; which is an untoward obligation. I do not like to owe my safety either to the generosity or affection of great persons, who allow me my legality and my liberty, nor to the obliging manners of my predecessors, or my own; for what if I were another kind of man? If my deportment, and the frankness of my conversation, or relationship, oblige my neighbors, ‘tis cruel that they should acquit themselves of that obligation in only permitting me to live, and that they may say “We allow him the free liberty of having divine service read in his own private chapel when it is interdicted in all churches round about, and allow him the use of his goods and his life, as one who protects our wives and cattle in time of need.” For my house has for many descents shared in the reputation of Lycurgus the Athenian, who was the general depositary and guardian of the purses of his fellow-citizens. Now I am clearly of opinion that a man should live by right and by authority, and not either by recompense or favor. How many gallant men have rather chosen to lose their lives than to be debtors for them? I hate to subject myself to any sort of obligation, but above all, to that which binds me by the duty of honor. I think nothing so dear as what has been given me, and this because my will lies at pawn under the title of gratitude, and more willingly accept of services that are to be sold; I feel that for the last I give nothing but money, but for the other I give myself. The knot that binds me by the laws of courtesy binds me more than that of civil constraint; I am much more at ease when bound by a scrivener, than by myself.”