Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature by Roger A. Ladd (review)

Just as the bourgeoisie is always rising, scholarship about that rise seems always to be appearing. Roger A. Ladd’s study of merchants and antimercantile rhetoric in late medieval English literature, a very gently revised version of his 2000 dissertation, adds to the latest bumper crop of work on the medieval “middle estate,” a crop that in the years since he finished the first version of the project has included (among many others) books by Sarah Beckwith, D. Vance Smith, Lianna Farber, Kellie Robertson, Nicola Masciandaro, and myself, literary studies that draw on the historical work of Caroline M. Barron, Christopher Dyer, Martha C. Howell, Joel Kaye, Peter Spufford, and Heather Swanson. What the literary studies have in common is their engagement with medieval textuality’s usually multifaceted and often conflicted representation of the production and sale of goods, on the one hand, and of those who produced and sold those goods, on the other. If the literature scholars listed above have tended to focus more on the side of production than otherwise, it may be because of the historical materialist sympathies that have driven literary criticism for quite some time. Thus it is a little surprising to find Ladd attributing the relative paucity of attention paid to merchants to “class-guilt on the part of scholars who desire to launder our own middle-class origins” (p. 1).

While this is a dubious claim, Ladd is right that very few have seen fit to study the merchant’s presence in medieval literature at any length (Farber, as he notes, is an exception, but her work focuses predominantly on ideas about exchange rather than on merchants themselves), and his book is a welcome step toward correcting that imbalance. It would be nice to know more about why he feels that merchants should finally get “the attention they deserve” (p. 1) beyond the inescapable facts that they are there to be studied and that few have done so. A more developed rationale for the book is hinted at in the first chapter, which notes that in the works he intends to explore, one finds “the traces of an emergent pro-trade ideology,” and that “[d]etermining the trajectory of . . . [that] ideology” is his primary goal (p. 5). Ladd, it seems, is out to rescue merchants not only from the scholarly shadows to which he feels they have been relegated (“they have not been treated fairly by posterity, particularly literary studies” [p. 160]) but also from the shadow of explicit or implicit opprobrium on the part of medieval writers and medievalists alike; as he says, “[If] we look at merchants only as objects of satire, it is all too easy to forget that merchants were more than just types—they were also real people, beset by ideological conflict over their profession” (p. 5). Of course, as Ladd frequently admits over the course of the next four chapters and is most explicit about in the book’s conclusion, it is difficult to get at “real people” from literary texts; much of what he has to say about actual merchants and their relationship to the works that represent them are suppositions based in close reading. Ladd’s study is really more about the language used to condemn merchants (hence the “antimercantilism” of his title) and its gradual mitigation than it is about merchants themselves, a distinction he is not himself always careful to note as he ultimately argues for a “developing merchant subjectivity” visible in some, if not all, of the works he reads (p. 155). Only in the short conclusion—which would have been more effective had it formed part of the introduction—does Ladd acknowledge the “gap between merchant self-representation and literary representations” (p. 159).

The book’s introductory chapter reviews both older and more recent scholarship on the three estates, articulates how flexible the social category of “merchant” (like that of “artisan”) was in late medieval England, and provides an overview of the way anyone...