Roger Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature.

Ladd, Roger. Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print.

           Roger Ladd's Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature sets out to correct an error the author sees in current scholarship of Middle English literature, namely the omission of merchants. Ladd indicates that this is beginning to change, but makes a moderately compelling case that scholarship is both explicitly and implicitly predisposed to the three estates model, jumbling merchants into either those who fight, pray, or work depending on the specific needs of critics, who often focus on a sole estate for their studies. Ladd pronounces that he, too, will focus on a single estate, but rather than follow the three estates paradigm he will focus on merchants as an individual estate. 

Ladd's text does a fair job of plotting out the liminal position of merchants, who often straddled various social strata throughout their lives. Even forming an in depth discussion of how guilds, craft and charitable, shaped the merchant's identity, Ladd works in his first chapter to carve out the position and role of the merchant estate. With this model in place, Ladd reads the antimercantile sentimentes in Piers Plowman (Ladd argues that Langland's shifting use of economic language and ideology demonstrates the tension between spiritual and worldly economies), Gower's Mirour de l'Omne (Ladd argues that Gower's Mirour demonstrates the poet's own liminal position between merchant and gentry), and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Ladd suggests that Chaucer performs the most subtle and effective critique of the mercantile estate). In the end, Ladd pitches that his text is more aimed at invigorating discussion on a largely neglected topic.

While I found Ladd's text to makes some interesting points on the social position of the late medieval merchant, I agree with Donald Leech's book review in that it seems to be missing Joel Kaye's Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century. Moreover, I would say that Ladd's text would benefit largely from more consideration of medieval economic thought, although this is somewhat unfair as some of the texts I would like to see brought in, such as Diana Wood's Medieval Economic Thought, date very close to or after Ladd's own text. Regardless, Ladd is so focused on the social standing of the merchant in his first chapter that, while providing an interesting perspective, seems to be missing a more full consideration of the shifting positions on merchants, a trend that Diana Wood covers in great detail. Regardless, Ladd's text is quite useful in considerations of late medieval merchants, especially in Middle English texts.