Trade and Romance by Michael Murrin (review)

Murrin’s Trade and Romance ponders the central role of “Father Asia” on Western literature and commerce between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Michael Murrin locates Marco Polo’s Asian travel as the impetus for the increasingly global and miraculous literature within Western Europe. For Murrin, the traders and merchants who brought tales of the East back to Europe inspired writers and Western cultural imagination of the next four centuries. Murrin explicitly sets out to address “three aims:” the role of “Father Asia” in creating a new trend in European “heroic literature,” the place of the mercantile and the aristocratic (or knightly) classes, and the growing knowledge of the global geography. These aims are further separated by the three chronological subcategories of the Mongol Period, the Portuguese, and finally the English period—which begins with Marco Polo and culminates with Spenser, Marlowe and Milton, where Murrin sees the decline and skepticism of the East. The unspoken through lines of commerce, a growing mercantile audience, and the glorification of trade similarly help guide the reader.

Chapters 1 through 3 discuss the Mongol Empire and Marco Polo’s immensely popular travel journal, which brought the East and its geography into conversation with Western Europe, expanding the old boundaries of commerce and opening up the geographic diversity of “Father Asia’s” interior. Eastern cultures and their vastness, Murrin proposes, became popular and heroic within the Western romantic genre as a result of Marco Polo’s presentation of “the Marvelous Real.” As opposed to the Celtic fantasy of many Arthurian romances, this new Eastern romance “depended on real places that could be found on a map,” just places that were “very far away”(9). Murrin contends that the “older marvels” of romance were not displaced by this new reality; they simply contained more marvels and wonders than their predecessors. Thus Marco Polo and the Mongol empire, as it was portrayed to the Western audience, “created the myth of the faraway” which made not only the journey of Chretien de Troyes’s chivalric quest something heroic, now the goal and destination of that journey was equally important. Murrin sees this change exemplified in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, where the Squire envisions a large world of gift giving and trade between the khan and the kings of “Arabe and of Inde” (13). This opened geographic reality expanded further in Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, which illustrated the vast distance within inner Asia not yet explored by Western authors and thus required lengthy and marvelous trips to reach these far away places. Murrin again returns to Chretien to contrast the chivalric quest that could occur in any wilderness to this new romance that required a sufficiently distant locale and an “arduous journey” (16). The trade routes and Marco’s tales now added “the exotic” to romance’s host of characters as well, inspiring authors to create enemies and challenges such as “Marco’s Tibetan mastiff” and the feared Assassins of Alamut (30). The Assassins’ power “over time and space” made them suitable for romance, which Murrin takes up in his question of readership and audience through the Squire’s Tale’s appeal both “upward to the aristocracy” and “downward to the urban middling sort” (44). Again, commerce and “the commercial set” (or the rising urban class) becomes the central audience for romance’s Eastern expansion, which Murrin emphasizes in his fourth chapter on Boiardo’s mercantile adventures in Morgana’s gold mine in Orlando inamorato.

The discussion of the Portuguese covers the Portuguese trade dominance and coastal exploration of India through the Huon cycle and Vasco da Gama’s epic journey in Os Lusiadas. Murrin uses the Huon romance to illustrate both Portugal’s coastal supremacy and their growing desire to reach the interior of Asia, which the romances turn into chivalric quests—but in reality indicated the Portuguese desire “to reach the sources of the gold supply” within the continent (97). In Huon’s luxurious Castle of Adamant the economic interests are emphasized while also illustrating the European...