Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565–1655 by Goran Stanivukovic (review)

Knights in Arms studies a rich set of early modern prose romances on a very timely topic: chivalric masculinity and the growing trade between England and the eastern Mediterranean. Romance's knights trading in silks, spices, and pearls with Persian, Turkish, and Egyptian commercial interests, Goran Stanivukovic argues, have an increasingly ambiguous and negotiated relationship with the Muslim states of the eastern Mediterranean; they also have a more complex role as men vis-à-vis their crusader past and Islamic versions of masculinity. Stanivukovic has brought to light several archival manuscript romances and unstudied but popular published romances to enrich his analysis.

Knights in Arms is organized in two main sections, one focusing on "The Romance of Trade" and the other on "Intimacy, Sexuality, and the Queer Levant." Stanivukovic discusses specific romances in turn, or sometimes in pairs (as with Oceander and The Famous … Historie of Palladine), focusing on one or two key scenes or plot dynamics in each work. Knights in Arms makes some very interesting and suggestive arguments, most notably about English efforts to bypass Persian middlemen along the Silk Road and England's new trade with Turkey. The book's discussions of interracial marriages in romances, its notes on the doubling of anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim rhetoric, and its analyses of Turkish baths are particularly valuable. Its topics and texts are both important and under-studied, and Stanivukovic makes a good case for his questions and perspectives.

Knights in Arms does struggle on several fronts, however. On the literary side, with so many romances on the menu, Stanivukovic can only discuss one or two episodes from each work. This makes it difficult to get a sense of each work's flavour and contributions. This is frustrating, especially when the works are manifestly influential. Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania combined go by in under ten pages, for instance.

Similarly, the book's large scope creates frequently distracted, rushed, and sometimes unconvincing or contradictory arguments. Tudor/Stuart concepts of marriage get a scant two pages in which a misleading binarism is all the book has time for. Tudor/Stuart censorship is briefly dismissed as "designed only to catch heresy," followed later by a casual claim that sodomy was the most heinous crime imaginable in English religious writing. English trade with Turkey, though central to the argument, is without a sustained historical analysis. Masculinity does not receive the concentrated theoretical analysis that it deserves, though suggestive discussions are frequent.

What is more frustrating is that the book could actually have more time for these topics if it could organize its focus. Instead, the book creates multiple recursive loops, shifting back repeatedly to broader methodological, historical, and theoretical questions and definitions every few pages, and sometimes every few paragraphs. Often the same question or defence is engaged multiple times throughout the book, which is often distracting and confusing the reader (for the answer is not always the same). Masculine virtue is defined repeatedly, from different sources each time. Romances are defended against charges of anachronism and hyperbole not once but many times.

The question of audience is an example of this difficulty. Making a case that the romances were extremely popular and populist, Stanivukovic creates a problem for his manuscript's romances, unpublished and not obviously circulated. Further, when Stanivukovic presses this claim about the wide readership of the romances, he raises the spectre of the theatre, an even more broadly accessible genre. Perhaps sensing this conceptual difficulty, the book keeps re-asserting its claims about readership, speculating about who that readership might be in specific cases, briefly imagining the possible influence of a work, and so on. These are all distractions from the more provable analyses that the book could instead be providing.

The book's focus on literary analysis does improve considerably as...