Graphic Dispossession: “For I had lettres”
The astrolabe, depictions of Gog and Magog, and attitudes toward contemporary medieval Jews converge in the Travels of Mandeville, a popular travel book of the later fourteenth century.28 The Travels further overlays such convergence with maps of different alphabets that punctuate the text. The Hebrew alphabet comes to be marked as a tool of threat and conspiracy against Christians.29 The Travels, like the work of the Victorine school, has, nevertheless, been praised by scholars such as Mary Campbell and Stephen Greenblatt for its tolerance. Yet the Jews, Greenblatt notes, were the “most significant exception to tolerance.”30 The force of their exclusion strikes even more when the model of human diversity in the Travels is taken into account. Drawing on prevalent astrological notions regarding the influence of the movement of the stars and planets on human nature, the Travels argues that it is not “who” you were (identity), but “where” you were (geography) that accounted for human diversity. The reliance on contingency of place instead of some fixed notion of human essence did foster tolerance, until this astrological model of human diversity intersected with an apocalyptic tradition of “astrological” theology. It is to that tradition that I now turn briefly, since an understanding of its influence on the narrator of the Travels can help to delineate how a profound dispossession of Jews rests at the heart of this so-called tolerant astrological model of human diversity.
Throughout the fourteenth century, medieval scholars increasingly sought to calibrate the “time line” of universal history with calculations from astronomy and astrology in order to refine predictions for the onset of the Last Days.31 Valerie Flint has observed that early in the Imago mundi Honorius consistently interpolated information on astrology and magic into his revisions of his world history. Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), whose 1410 Imago mundi Christopher Columbus read and annotated, attempted to align the relative chronologies found in world histories (drawn from such diverse sources as biblical history, Greek and Roman history, papal lists, and the events of contemporary history) onto an “independent” time line dated by astrological conjunctions. Students of conjunctions had studied, in particular, the “historical” paths of Saturn and Jupiter through the zodiac and observed their relations to each other. Using their conjunctions as chronological points, d’Ailly then constructed his astrological time line which provided for a serial transition from past to future, from history to prophecy. In order to authorize this “scientific” approach to theological temporality, scholars needed to prognosticate successfully. The ensuing pressure to predict events contributed to an overdetermining concern with timing of the advent of Antichrist: “l’astrologie devient une herméneutique de l’apocalypse chrétienne.”32 Calculation of that advent entangled astrological theology with popular conflations of medieval Jews with Gog and Magog, whose eruption would be the sign of his coming.33 Thus scholarly models of “human diversity” paradoxically resonated with popular notions that denied Jewish neighbors their coevalness.
The exclusion of Jews from this tolerant astrological model of human diversity can be traced in the Travels through the medium of the alphabet. What astrology liberally relativized in the Travels, its alphabet-lore reinstalled as a hard line between West and East. The Travels uses a geography of the alphabet as one of its chief ploys to exclude Jews.34 Alphabets appear in the text when the narrator arrives at the border of a region. At that point he traces out the forms and names of the letters of its alphabet. Such topographical edges and their respective alphabets occur along Mandeville’s route in the following order: Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Saracen, Persian, and Chaldean. This alphabetical mapping exercise ends as the traveler comes to the islands of India. At the juncture the narrative turns from a traceable land route to a watery voyage marked by the interruptions of the many islands of an archipelago.
As the Travels encounters Indians it waxes “rational,” just as Alfonsi did in his Dialogue when he countered Moses and his talmudic interpretation with scientific discussion of the contingency of longitude. The traveler leaves alphabets behind on the Indian archipelago and enters a world governed by stars.35 The longest commentary on the astral geography of the archipelago occurs on the Indian isle of Lamary where, the author informs his reader, the Lamarians live in a state of nature. They go naked and hold sexual partners and property in common. Lamarians observe no rule of descent and parcel out their offspring to sexual partners without distinctions. Since they recognize no rules of kinship and therefore have no incest taboo, it is not surprising to learn that the Larmarians are the first cannibals to be encountered in the Travels. They literally perform the undoing of kinship by eating their children. Christian readers, who were familiar with exempla and also ritual murder stories that portrayed Jews as the local cannibals of Christendom, certainly might think of Jews when they read about Lamarians.36 It is precisely at this overdetermined juncture that the narrator begins his discourse on the astrolabe. He argues for the roundness of the earth and its circumnavigability by means of a lecture on longitude:37
The whiche thing I prove thus, after that i have seyn. For I have ben toward the partes of Braban and beholden in the Astrolabre that the steere that is clept the transmontayne is liiii. degrees high, And more forthere in Almayne and Bewme it hath lviii. degrees, and more forth toward the parties Septemtrioneles it is lxii. degrees of heghte and certeyn mynutes, for I self have mesured it be the Astrolabe.38
After this technological interlude, the Travels then leaves behind the cannibalistic Lamarians in order to pass on to the lands of Prester John. The site of Gog and Magog, however, stands directly in the way. Once again Jews interrupt the itinerary, this time not evocatively, as in the case of the Lamarians, but overtly, as the Travels describes the ten lost tribes enclosed in Gog and Magog.39 According to the Travels Jews cannot escape their enclosure because the only language they know is Hebrew, a language unknown to neighboring communities:
and also thei conen no langage but only hire owne that noman knoweth but thei, and therfore mowe thei not gon out. And also thee schull understonde that the Iewes han no propre lond of hire owne for to dwellen inne in all the world, but only that lond betwene the mountaynes.40
The Travels also insists here that the Jews have persisted in this seemingly counterproductive monolingualism in order to be able to recognize each other as fellow conspirators in the last days:
And thit natheless men seyn thei schull gon out in the tyme of Antecrist and that thei schull maken gret slaughter of cristene men, and therfore all the Iewes that dwellen in all londes lernen all weys to speken Ebrew, in hope that whan the other Iewes schull gone out, that thei may understonden hire speche and to leden hem in to cristendom for to destroye the cristene peple. For the Iewes seyn that thei knowen wel be hire prophecyes that thei of Caspye schull gon out and spreden throgh out all the world. And that the cristene men schull ben under hire subieccioun als longe as thei han ben in subieccioun of hem.41
The spoken Hebrew (could the narrator of the Travels be recognizing emergent Yiddish?) in the “East” of the Travels thus begins to collide with the Hebrew alphabet located by the narrator in the “West.” One suspects that the author saw a gap between “classical” or scriptural languages and the spoken language of medieval Jews in northern Europe. Whereas the Travels uses alphabets to guarantee “Western” civilization and the stars to explain “natural” (Eastern) diversity,