Political Ideals, Gothic Italian Art, Gifts and Reciprocity

From the Foreword to this text: I have known the author of this paper, Dr. Elizabeth Higgs, since 2001, when I took a graduate anthropology class from her. At the very least, I have found her to be a highly competent instructor. While she still teaches anthropology, she has since been doing graduate work in other fields, most recently in art history. Having seen an early draft of this paper, I encouraged her to turn it into an ebook. Her response was to send the current version of this course paper to me for that purpose. Since then, I have edited it and turned it into the ebook we had previously discussed. While some of her scholarly citations have been paraphrased in order to avoid copyright infringement outside academe, the only ones that have been removed are those which I felt would make her work less accessible to a lay audience.There was no table of contents in the original version of this paper. Since it has not felt right for me to create one for this version of Dr. Higgs' work, there is none added in this instance.As a mental health professional (I am a clinical mental health counsellor) I shall be making comments at the end of this work about some of the psychological implications of what Dr. Higgs discusses. William L. Smit