Chapter 5, “Dis-Orienting the Self: The Uncanny Travels of John Mandeville,” describes the way that at each turn the Travels’ narrator performs the Christian self’s uncanny and unsettling indistinguishability from its would-be pagan and Muslim “others.” One might, with reason, say that such slippage is the logical end point of the cultural and religious interpenetration observed in previous chapters. But, as I argue, the crisis of the uncanny in the Travels ultimately finds its source in the fourteenth century’s preoccupation with the question of non-Christian salvation and what, if anything, distinguished Christians from other religious communities. Of all the texts of the book, the Travels perhaps best reflects the poetics of writing “in light of another’s word,” displaying episodes that foreground external perspectives on Latin Christian practices, cite from the voice of the other, demonstrate the disorienting effects of other words and worlds on the European self abroad, and insist on the limits and contingencies of the European gaze—and of Latin Christian claims of universalism—upon and within a diverse world.
It is a critical commonplace that the European Middle Ages have frequently been constructed in relation to the modern era, whether as its backward and savage antithesis or, conversely, as a time of relative liberation from modernity’s political and social discontents. Yet the ethnographic evidence of this study suggests something far more nuanced than either of these familiar poles allows. If the writers of In Light of Another’s Word break with expectation in dialogically representing the other in his own words and language, so seemingly prefiguring the ideals of intersubjective ethnographic practice in the postcolonial period, their texts illustrate that they did so at great personal discomfort and risk in the face of the governing orthodoxies of their day. That we can hear the voices of medieval Europe’s others in these narratives in spite of these orthodoxies allows us to take full measure of the forces of productive disorientation and destabilization at work on these early ethnographic writers through word- and world-altering encounter.
CHAPTER 1
Conquest, Conversion, Crusade, Salvation
The Discourse of Anthropology and Its Uses in the Medieval Period
If ethnography, defined as discourse on observed manners and customs, has a very long history, anthropology, defined not as the academic discipline established in the twentieth century but as the set of ideas and theories attempting to account for cultural diversity or the unity of the “human,” has an equally long history.1 Anthropological thinking in the medieval period can be divided into two main discourses, each with its own distinctive assumptions and approaches to the other, the discourse of Christianity and the discourse of civility.2 The medieval discourse of civility, derived from the Epicurean tradition of writers such as Lucretius and made available to medieval writers primarily through Cicero, posited a universal, linear model of cultural development according to which all cultures progressed through certain stages of development on a continuum from savagery to civility. This secular model was deployed in twelfth-century contexts of colonization or conquest along Europe’s borders as a justification for the subjugation of native peoples. It was applied irrespective of the Christianity of its subject peoples, at once to the pagan Slavs on Europe’s eastern border and the already-Christian Irish and Welsh on Europe’s northwest border.3 The discourse of Christianity, on the other hand, sought the conversion of the other, and so deployed a spatial model that distinguished “humanity,” the realm of all possible converts according to universal Christian thought, from all that lay beyond it, the realm of the inhuman, semihuman, or monstrous. Medieval mappaemundi well demonstrate the spatial logic of the discourse of Christianity. Thirteenth-century European world maps such the Psalter map picture the globe as an orb over which Christ presides, or in the case of the Ebstorf map, as an orb out of which Christ’s very limbs—his head, hands, and feet—may be seen to project. The contemplator of such a map (and they were meant for religious contemplation) would have found Jerusalem at the center, the Garden of Eden circled at the eastern top, and a host of biblical stories drawn in as pictorial lessons before reaching the map’s southern fringe. There medieval viewers would have confronted a series of monsters, figural representations of Pliny’s legendary monstrous races: the Cynocephiles or dog heads, the cubit-sized Pygmies, the cannibal Anthropophages, the doubly sexed Androgynes. While for Pliny the monstrous races may have expressed the curious diversity and plenitude of natural history, for Christian thinkers as early as Augustine they presented very real doctrinal problems: were these races the descendants of Adam, and if not, how did they get there? Augustine devotes book 16, chapter 8, in the City of God to the question of “the origin of recorded monstrosities,” where he writes: “There are accounts in pagan history of certain monstrous races of men.… What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog’s head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere a man—that is, a rational and mortal being—derives from that one first-created human being.” He concludes his discussion, by his own admission, tentatively and open-endedly thus: “the accounts of some of these races may be completely worthless, but if such peoples exist, then either they are not human; or, if human, they are descended from Adam.”4 The monstrous races may well exist then and may be nonhuman; Augustine left medieval thinkers to grapple with the implications. We see in mappaemundi like the Psalter map one response to the problem: late medieval mapmakers drew in the monstrous races at the outer limits of the inhabited world where they stood, at once, for the limit of their own geographical knowledge and for the final frontier of the Christian message—for as all Christians knew, no pastoral outreach would be possible, required, or desirable toward nonhumans. The discourse of Christianity, then, depended above all on the distinction of the properly human, and hence possibly Christian, from the nonhuman. As such, the discouse of Christianity implicates a host of other discourses, including those of the monstrous races, the wild man, and the barbarian, devoted to the same definitional work.
Figure 1. The Psalter Map. British Library Additional ms 28681, f.9. Courtesy of the British Library.
In what follows I lay out some of the major sources for the discourses of civility and Christianity in the high medieval period. The former found particular application along the borders of Europe during its twelfth-century expansion, the latter, in the dreams of converting the Mongols during the thirteenth-century opening of Asia to Europe via the missions. Innocent IV’s unique and remarkably influential contribution to medieval anthropology, his consideration of the conditional sovereignty rights of non-Christians living abroad, will be considered as an important signpost in the development of the medieval discourse of Christianity. I will then turn to the realm of the Crusades, and consider medieval European attitudes toward the proximate Muslim enemy by examining developments in Latin knowledge of and interest in Muslim religion and Arabic culture. Finally, I consider the medieval discourse of the virtuous pagan, forerunner of the Renaissance noble savage in its primitivist celebration of the uncultured piety and goodness of select non-Christians. This discourse, which dovetailed with the theological and philosophical discourses about the salvation of non-Christians, found a range of applications abroad in the late Middle Ages, from encounters with the Brahmins of India, such as in Mandeville’s