However, Edward Peters offers a more complicated overview, noting that while curiositas was viewed warily by many Christian authors who remarked on its capacity to augment the vices, its connection with travel and gaining knowledge of the world through personal experience or study was by no means incompatible with the Christian ethos. To be a Christian was indeed to be a traveler, a pilgrim: “the actual existence of the Christian was a peregrinatio, the existence of a stranger in a strange land. … Christians were to consider themselves viators in peregrinatione, homines viatores.”68 Pilgrims, kings, and indeed all Christians had reason to be curious about the world that God had created, and with the broadening of European mental horizons following the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century their version of “holy curiosity” took in a vastly expanded geography. Citing Friar Pipino’s pious preface to Marco Polo’s Divisament, Peters asserts, “If the variety of the world, its ‘secrets’ in this sense, existed to demonstrate to man the power of his Creator, then failure to encounter that variety might be considered a failure in religious duty.”69 Richard Newhauser also argues for a more finessed understanding of vitium curiositatis, emphasizing that it should be thought of as excessive curiosity and considered in relation to the specific concerns of moral thinkers such as the perceived secularization of theological studies and teaching and exaggerated care for worldly matters. Not every medieval mention of curiositas, he points out, should be read as indication of vitium curiositatis. Seriously seeking knowledge was not sinful.70
Wonder is an impulse or response with less investment in the goal of reaching understanding of phenomena through cognitive processes than is implied by curiosity. It is a condition of fascination, of hunger for what is outside oneself, which may or may not lead to comprehension.71 Wonder—admiratio—had a respectability in medieval theological thought that the vitium curiositatis was frequently seen to lack as it avoided dangers of intellectual pride and the wish to approach an omniscience properly pertaining only to God. Some things, it was thought, reached beyond “ability to comprehend and explain; and such marvels as werewolves, hybrids, and miracles, for all their tortured reflections, remained the object of admiration and amazement and wonder rather than simply of appropriation and analysis and generalization.”72 The medieval sense of wonder is impossible to reduce to a single definition, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s article on the subject demonstrates, but was an emotive and intellectual response to unfamiliar or extraordinary phenomena that could manifest as awe, pleasure, dread, or horror.73
The worlds and peoples described in some medieval travel writing were inspired by a wonder impulse, where the representation of the marvelous, including much that does not look strange to modern eyes, is enough in itself, inspiring pleasure, awe, disgust, or other affective responses. The accounts found in other travel writing, or the responses by other readers, were guided by the desire to learn of distant worlds and peoples: that is, they were guided by serious curiosity. Yet in many works the two impulses seem to be blended. New knowledge was sought to satisfy a range of needs. Some were pragmatic—strategic, military, or mercantile. Carpini’s Historia and Pegolotti’s manual for merchants, for example, served essentially practical aims. Other works, such as the epistles of John of Monte Corvino and the other early Franciscan missionaries to China, served a combination of spiritual and pragmatic ambitions, offering their readers encouraging views of evangelical prospects in the East. We have seen that Roger Bacon explicitly justified the importance of geographical knowledge on evangelical and eschatological grounds in his Opus majus. Yet the translation of many of the key texts into various vernaculars and their transmission among secular as well as clerical readers suggest much more varied appeal. It was also during this late medieval period that interest in instructional, courtesy, and conduct literature began to take hold. The great age of the conduct book would not come until the early modern period when print made improving literature available to a much wider audience, but one sees the beginnings of the phenomenon from the later thirteenth century. Works on governance such as the Secretum secretorum and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum were widely copied and translated; manuals of advice on proper gendered behavior began to emerge; and by the mid-fifteenth century, under the influence of the elaborate Burgundian courts, one sees a growing preoccupation with household ritual among the aristocracy and interest in personal manners and hygiene.74 Travel writing does not share conduct literature’s prescriptiveness—the ways of life that it holds up for examination could serve as models to follow or to avoid—but the two discourses developed at around the same time and for some of the same purposes. Chapter 7 of the present work, titled “Civility,” explores some aspects of oriental city and court culture held up as exemplary for European readers.
Conclusion
There was a utopic quality to some medieval writing on the distant East. The human need to believe in possibilities for a better life found some succor in travelers’ visions of the East. In Oscar Wilde’s much later words, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”75 The spirit of Wilde’s statement may have made some sense to medieval readers although the language of utopianism had yet to be invented. The travel writing of the later Middle Ages was not in some way an inferior precursor to a true travel literature but, instead, appealed to its readers because it spoke to their interests and concerns which happen in many cases to be different from ours.
Travel and the quest for knowledge go hand in hand, as Roxanne L. Euben argues in one of the most stimulating recent contributions to travel-writing studies: “[F]rom Bacon’s characterization of travelers as ‘merchants of light,’ to Montesquieu’s description of his fictional Persian travelers as searchers after wisdom, to Nietzsche’s contention that ‘we must travel, as old Herodotus travelled’ in part because ‘[i]mmediate self observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to know ourselves,’” travel recurs.76 I have suggested that late medieval readers looked to travel literature not only to know but also to change themselves and their society, while also indulging in the many pleasures of the text and in their long-held myths of oriental marvels. They felt that the cultures of the East held much that was not only, variously, horrifying, strange, or marvelous but at times also admirable and instructive. While pragmatic or spiritual aims guided the production of certain texts, many of the books that resonated most for contemporary readers were those that inspired new ideas about how to live and presented an enticing vision of a world without want. They were produced within a period on the cusp between a spiritually defined “Christendom” and a “Europe” that was primarily secular in conception. Late medieval travel writing on the Orient had a part to play in the making of that Europe.
PART II
Envisioning Orients
Chapter 4
Food and Foodways
The act of eating expresses profound, even intimate, acceptance.