Publisher Description

In Trade and Romance, Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows how these tales of romance, ostensibly meant for the aristocracy, were important to the growing mercantile class as a way to gauge their own experiences in traveling to and trading in these exotic locales. Murrin also looks at the role that growing knowledge of geography played in the writing of the creative literature of the period, tracking how accurate, or inaccurate, these writers were in depicting far-flung destinations, from Iran and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Pacific.           With reference to an impressive range of major works in several languages—including the works of Marco Polo, Geoffrey Chaucer, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Luís de Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and more—Murrin tracks numerous accounts by traders and merchants through the literature, first on the Silk Road, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century; then on the water route to India, Japan, and China via the Cape of Good Hope; and, finally, the overland route through Siberia to Beijing. All of these routes, originally used to exchange commodities, quickly became paths to knowledge as well, enabling information to pass, if sometimes vaguely and intermittently, between Europe and the Far East. These new tales of distant shores fired the imagination of Europe and made their way, with surprising accuracy, as Murrin shows, into the poetry of the period.

Author Biography

Michael Murrin is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is the author of History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, The Allegorical Epic, and The Veil of Allegory, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction: Asian Trade and Heroic Narrative from Marco Polo to Milton Part 1 The Mongols 1 Marco Polo and the Marvelous Real 2 A Paradise for Killers: Marco Polo and the Garden of the Assassins 3 The Squire's Tale : Romance as Mask 4 Morgana and Manodante: Boiardo and the Aristocratic Response to Mercantilism Part 2 The Portuguese 5 Huon at the Castle of Adamant 6 First Encounter: The Christian-Hindu Confusion When the Portuguese Reached India 7 Cam

Review

"Both immensely erudite and fun to read, Michael Murrin's Trade and Romance chronicles three stages of Europe's premodern commercial engagements with Asia: the traversing of the Silk Route, the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, and the exploration by Englishmen and Russians of a northern land route to China. Trade and Romance can be enjoyed not only by historians and literary scholars, for whom it will be essential reading, but also by a broader educated public that shares Murrin's interest in historical geography." (David Quint, Yale University)"

Review Quote

"How travel feeds literature and feeds on literature: this could well be a subtitle for Trade and Romance , a book that fires our imagination about places and peoples at the same time as it enhances scholarship. The section on the Portuguese enters both deeply and audaciously into central issues of Renaissance literature and imperial history, happily supplementing work from Murrin's earlier books Allegorical Epic and History and Warfare . As a climax to the section, the new interpretations of the sea-storm and its mythological ending in The Lusads will stand as one of the most brilliant moments in the history of Cames criticism."

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