Mediaevalia

The articles in this issue of Mediaevalia were drawn primarily from the September 2010 conference “Negotiating Trade: Commercial Institutions and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Medieval and Early Modern World.” The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University hosted the conference as the debut of its year-long institute on premodern global trade and commerce, which also included a lecture series. In keeping with the interdisciplinary spirit at the core of CEMERS, scholars representing the fields of history, art history, and literature participated in the institute and examined the social, economic, political, legal, and administrative aspects of exchange across borders, religions, and cultures in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The authors of these articles have used “institutions” as their lens in exploring these cross-cultural relations. The objects of this broadly defined theme range widely from Mongol hostels and French poor houses to English guild theater and Italian manuscript circulation, and they each shed light on how pre-modern individuals and societies communicated across distances, whether those distances were measured in miles, religious beliefs, or social practices.

In “Aspects of Trade in the Western Mediterranean during the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Perspectives from Islamic Fatw s and State Correspondance,” Russell Hopley draws on Islamic legal sources to determine some of the effects of widespread change in the eleventh- and twelfth-century western Mediterranean. Power struggles that involved the Almoravid, Almohad, and Norman regimes, and which eventually led to a reversal from Islamic to Christian dominance of the area, created multiple problems for trade both within and between the various spheres of influence. From Islamic [End Page 1] Spain and Morocco to Tunisia and Christian Sicily, Islamic judges had to decide the legal ramifications of issues such as the circulation of multiple currencies, commerce with Christian nations, and interfaith piracy.

The Mongol system of yams, or hostelries associated with the militarized postal service, was one of the most efficient premodern tools of communications, spanning the Empire, and was highly praised by foreign travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. It was likewise a source of great pride for the Mongol rulers themselves. In “Hotel Tartary,” Wan-Chuan Kao uses an impressive array of Chinese, Islamic, and Latin sources to shed light on the origins, functions, and maintenance of the yams, and demonstrates that the yams facilitated not merely trade, but also political control.

In “The Book’s Two Fathers: Marco Polo, Rustichello da Pisa, and Le Devisement du monde” Gina Psaki considers the theme, style, and structure of Marcol Polo’s co-authored masterpiece, and finds that trade infuses the work on a myriad of levels. Psaki shows that trade—so obviously central to the work’s content—also informs not only the genesis of this hybrid book, but also its very shape, and accounts as well for its suspension (it is unfinished). Through a close reading of a particular episode, Psaki also sheds new light on the nature of the artistic exchange or collaboration between the two authors.

In “Public Poems, Private Expenditures: Petrarch as Homo Economicus,” William J. Kennedy explores the intersections of aesthetics and economics in Petrarch’s Rime sparse. Through a consideration of scholastic discussions of economics and close readings of several poems, Kennedy argues that the portrayals of selfhood that dominate the pages of Petrarch’s lyric opus can be more fully understood in terms of medieval economic theory. Kennedy also examines Petrarch’s writing practices—especially that of his frequent and extensive revisions to his poems—and demonstrates the ways in which Petrarch is simultaneously participating in a literary economy stretching back to Ovid and perhaps attempting to enhance the economic and artistic value of his works in the contemporary marketplace.

In “‘On the Pavement, Thinking about the Government’: The Corpus Christi Cycle and the Emergence of Municipal Merchant Power in York” Meisha Lohmann considers the profound effect of increased commerce and the resulting wealth on the government of the city of York. More specifically, Lohmann explores how—as [End Page 2] and economic power shifted from the nobility...