Michael Murrin
Autor(a) de The veil of allegory;: Some notes toward a theory of allegorical rhetoric in the English Renaissance
Obras por Michael Murrin
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
There is no Common Knowledge data for this author yet. You can help.
Membros
Críticas
Prémios
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 4
- Also by
- 1
- Membros
- 30
- Popularidade
- #449,942
- Avaliação
- 5.0
- Críticas
- 1
- ISBN
- 7
Who’d have guessed the Mongols had such an effect on medieval romance? I didn’t, and I love them both. You have to look at the spatial sense Europeans had in the romances of Chretien de Troyes in the late 1100s, and set that against the vast spaces available to the imagination in Farther Asia – spaces and information. Romance changed from the ‘Celtic fantastic’ to the ‘marvelous real’, whose tutelary spirit was Marco Polo. The poets followed his passion for accuracy – funnily enough, as this book is set out to demonstrate. Its parts are specific. If I have a crit, it's that the book deals too much in specifics, so that I feel I'm hopping from island to island on an archipelago.
Did you know Marlowe’s Tamburlaine engages with the Muscovy Company out of London and its search for a Siberian route to the silk supplies in Cathay? Neither did I, but Murrin quotes chapter and verse, why Timur is shifted a thousand miles west, how his comrades are names known for their anti-Ottoman activities, how his goals were English goals. His atrocities, too, have less to do with the historical Timur than with what these Muscovy English witnessed of Ivan the Terrible’s. A topical Tamburlaine. Make of it what you will, but it is background.
Merchants were the heroes of these great ventures into Asia, and that sat uneasily with traditional romance. So you have the gap between Chaucer’s Knight and his son, the Squire. The Knight has fought in the usual places, but his world looks circumscribed when we come to the Squire’s Tale, set in Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde – whose king is Cambyuskan (that’s Genghis Khan disguised). Soldiers didn’t visit Sarai, merchants did. As Murrin doesn’t need to tell me, since I remember Chaucer class, the Squire’s Tale has been so out of fashion it’s not funny – however, when Milton thinks of Chaucer it’s the Squire’s Tale he names. Until he changed his mind on the whole Asia-exploration thing and festooned Satan and his devils with Eastern metaphor. – Satan’s an Ottoman Sultan in his palace.
Even more out of fashion are other romances Murrin hangs his arguments on. Huon of Bordeaux, hard to get, poorly thought of when it’s got. Yet its plot must be of historical interest: Huon visits Kumans on the steppe, he converts the admiral of Persia and marches with him on the Mamluks. As these romances explored Asia in the footsteps not of nobles but of a lower sort, their reputation goes into decline. Romance fights hard for reputation anyhow, in my lifetime, and these have been called ‘composite romances’ – whatever that may mean. Late and impure? They are composite in that they fed on travel tales, and the cult of the ‘marvelous real’ discovered things undreamt – Quinsai with canals like Venice but forty times the size. The merchants had found and could visit lands more wonderful than knights could ever see.
I haven’t mentioned a large section on the Lusiads and the Portuguese adventure in India – because I still haven’t read the Lusiads, and Inner Asia is my beat. I wish he had told me more on Spenser's fairyland as Asia, but he says he's written about that elsewhere, so elsewhere I'll have to go.
2013 must be the year of Asia in the romances. First I had the wonderful The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto by Jo Ann Cavallo and at the end of the year this. Mind, they can clash with each other. Murrin spends time telling Boiardo he’s got the landscape wrong about Bukhara – and never airs the possibility that Albracca can be other than Bukhara. But Cavallo argued against this old equation, and found that the siege of Albraca invokes other parts of Mongol history. I think they have different ideas on Boiardo altogether. Read them both.… (mais)