Blog Entry 3
Over the course of this gift-giving and memoria lessons of this course, I have learned about both the history behind gift-giving and memoria. Starting with gift-giving, people start with giving gifts, in the hopes of the return of gifts or something such as prayer in return. In class, we talked about how gifts now are given in hopes of reciprocity at a later time. This created the idea that historians call the gift exchange. These gift exchanges can happen in the present day at events such as baby showers, bridal showers, weddings, birthdays, graduations, holidays, and many more. However during the Middle Ages gifts were given to show honor and wealth. Almost to show the social status of someone or a family. Because of this development to show status, the Middle Ages, from 500-1000 became a gift based economy. Memoria can be connected to the gifts, because the gifts were given by people to remember the dead during the Middle Ages. People during the Middle Ages were very worr...