Michael Murrin's Trade and Romance is one of the very few monographs that explore the impact of Asian travels upon Western literary imagination in the early stage of East-West contact. By locating the beginning of the Eastern influence in Chaucer's response to Marco Polo's travel reports in The Squire's Tale (c. 1400) and its culmination in Milton's Paradise Regained (1671), Murrin greatly expands the contact zone between East and West. This broad historical coverage is minutely woven into the vast geographical span that encompasses the Far East, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and Southeast Asia at one sweep. It is against this grand historical and geographical backdrop that the three national portraits—the Mongols, Portuguese, and English, and the three core themes—“the role of Asia in Europe; knights and merchants; and geography” (p. 4)—take shape and meaning. The central drama of the book, that is, “trade and romance,” emerges naturally out of this panoramic stage.
It is an innovative move to tie together trade and romance or to study how trade shapes and adds a new twist to literary genres. Murrin has done an admirable job in illustrating this central thesis with some relevant case studies. The dilemma of the romancer in an age of burgeoning Eastern trade was that he “had to fit the East into a chivalric perspective and reject its mercantile allure” (p. 80). This dilemma is vividly dramatized in Matteo Maria Boiardo's (1441–94) romance Orlando innamorato (Roland in love) (1483, 1495), in which the author presents a powerful case in tracing how the protagonist Orlando wrestles with the mercantile implications of his various heroic deeds. The vicissitudes experienced by the romance cycle Huon de Bordeaux (1261–68) as registered in “the Castle of Adamant” also provide a convincing vignette of how Western romance adapted to the commercial networks spawned by Genoese and Portuguese merchants in their successive ventures into the East. The valiant attempts made by the Portuguese epic poet Luís Vaz de Camões in his Os Lusíadas (1572) prove another highlight of literary negotiation with mercantile infiltration. Though “greed and corruption” unavoidably accruing to commercial enterprises “were not considered fit material for epic” (pp. 151, 152), Murrin observes, “Camões does what he can to stress heroism and raise the stylistic level for the scenes at Calicut” (p. 138).
These powerful case studies are well substantiated by the remarkable archival research Murrin has conducted. The archival data featured in the book includes reports and documents on Genoese commercial activities in Sarai on the Volga, the search by the English for the Arctic route to Cathay and their adventures through the Volga-Caspian to Iran, the Portuguese exploration of the African littorals and their march into the Indian Sea and Southeast Asia, as well as Russia's seeking of an overland route to Beijing. Murrin not only adeptly orchestrates and weaves this astonishing variety of sources into his stories but also offers some insightful and even original readings, interpretations that, in turn, shed new light on the literary responses to these Asian reports.
But these compelling episodes cannot mask some less successful ones, especially those concerning the English story. Above all, the title of chapter 3, “The Squire's Tale: Romance as Mask,” is misleading, since Murrin mentions the concept “mask” only at the end of the chapter. Nor does he use this concept to reflect upon previous analyses or elaborate the interrelationships between what he calls “aristocratic reading” (p. 45), “social reading” (p. 47), and “astrological reading” (p. 55) of the Squire's tale. The least persuasive portraits involve the chapters on Spenser and Milton. For instance, chapter 9 makes the promising observation that “Red Cross travels in the same zone as do the agents of the Muscovy Company” (p. 194). To regard The Faerie Queene as a “corporate genre” and use the “company model” (p. 196) to approach Spenser's epic poem is a productive move as well. But the analyses of these two potential arguments lack the necessary depth, clarity, and sophistication because Murrin fails to spell out the deeper rationale underlying those assumed parallels and resonances. Likewise, Murrin rightly points out Milton's “deliberate archaism” (p. 255) in Paradise Lost, but his attribution of its cause to “a blurring of vision that now marks his view of Asia” and “a changed attitude toward that Asian material” (p. 245) is less convincing. Murrin did not explore alternative readings and other possible implications of this intentional archaism either at the textual or contextual levels.
The book would be more compelling if Murrin had paid attention to the following three aspects. First, his stated methodology, that is, “a strictly historical view” (p. 3) cannot effectively articulate the conceptual range he covers. A more cogent and sharply focused theoretical lens would give the materials a more persuasive appeal. Second, the book lacks an organic or tightly knitted connection between the textual and contextual materials. Most of the time, Murrin just quotes the texts without tying them to the context with in-depth analyses. Third, instead of taking them for granted, Murrin should clarify and distinguish between such crucial concepts as heroic romance, epic romance, “composite romance” (p. 43), and “corporate” romance.
Despite the unevenness manifest in the elaborations of Murrin's central argument and some of the conceptual problems, however, the book as a whole deserves critical acclaim for its original attempt and some insightful readings.
