Medieval travel books allowed readers to turn their gaze to an oriental vista of variety and magnificence. Thus they saw marvels but also much that was ordinary; earthly pleasures as well as terrors; advanced civilizations and primitive ones; Otherness but also Sameness and Similarity. Because they lacked territorial designs on far eastern lands, they rarely assumed the kind of secular Eurocentric superiority we are more familiar with. They were prepared to be impressed by cultures that had reached high standards of civic life, court culture, and social organization, while also reveling in an Orient of fertility, abundance, and sensual pleasure. All the time they retained a willing regard for marvels and the occasional monstrosity. This book tells part of the story of how European people looked at other cultures, the motivations for their interest, and the consequences of their changing gaze. As we engage with medieval accounts of encounter we find diverse responses that complicate our understanding of medieval perceptions of foreign cultures.
PART I
Theory, People, Genres
Chapter 1
On Orientalism
The title Before Orientalism is at once a hook, a tease, and a statement of intent. The book could have been called Alongside Orientalism, or perhaps Between Orientalisms, without alteration to its fundamental arguments. Though Orientalist elements have been identified in medieval representations of Islam and Arab cultures, they apply much less to the rest of Asia. This chapter examines the chronology of the three main strands to Orientalism as they relate to medieval Europe’s more distant “Easts.” It finds that while elements of two out of the three may be tentatively identified in medieval writings on far eastern places, they do not add up to a version of Orientalism as defined by Said. A developed Orientalist discourse would have to wait until the early modern period or even beyond. Ultimately, late medieval writings on distant Easts are pre-Orientalist primarily because they are precolonialist.
Edward Said offered three interlinked definitions of Orientalism in his classic work. First, the European academic study of Asian societies; second, a tendency to group the diverse cultures of “the East” under one heading and those of “the West” under another to produce the binary distinction of “Orient” and “Occident”; and third—the most controversial one—an ideologically loaded discourse by which western societies have extended, developed, and justified political, economic, and other domination over eastern territories. This third element is best expressed by Said himself: “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient!”1 Lucy Pick notes that the first two elements have, in Said’s presentation, an almost timeless, eternal quality, while the third arose in the eighteenth century in response to the “colonial aspirations of post-Enlightenment Europe.”2 She and other medievalists have queried most aspects of his chronology with regard to the Middle Ages, especially concerning Latin Christendom’s relationship with Islam, but there has been less attention paid to Orientalism’s potential application to other Asian regions in the medieval era.
It must be said at the outset that few specialists in Middle Eastern or Asian studies have been persuaded by Said’s appraisal of scholarly endeavors by academic Orientalists.3 Indeed, his book has been found to be riddled with errors, flagrant omissions, and drastic overgeneralizations. Some of this critique will be discussed in what follows. On the other hand, Said’s concept has had wide utility and application when treated as a tool for interpreting certain western representations of subjected cultures, especially in literature and the visual arts, rather than as a reliable guide to entire branches of scholarship. Recurrent themes in cultural Orientalism include a tendency to portray Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian cultures as decadent, decayed, corrupt, and effeminate. Key elements are identified in Dawn Odell’s analysis of Jean-Leon Gerome’s painting The Snake Charmer (c. 1870), a reproduction of which adorned a 1979 edition of Said’s Orientalism. The painting represents a “European stereotype of the Orient as the site of danger, luxury, effeminacy, degeneration and superstition, including strong suggestions of sodomy, penetration and submission in the central figure of the boy and his position, bare-buttocks to the viewer.”4 In a colonial context such caricatures of the Orient and its inhabitants helped justify their submission to western powers. That, at least, is the broad argument.
Said focused first on the Middle East and Egypt, though his book makes regular passing references to south and east Asian contexts and his subsequent Culture and Imperialism extended the basic premise to colonial contexts including “Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean.”5 Other scholars have found his theories relevant, at least as a starting point, in studies of various Asian regions but particularly Japan, China, and India.6 Odell’s question—“Is this the Orient?”—is pertinent, as is her recognition that Said’s book posits a distinction between an authentic geographical location and its ideological construction in western representations.7 Said admits that his own “awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies” lies behind his initial Middle Eastern focus. He wanted “to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. That is why for me the Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention.”8 While acknowledging both the narrow and very broad geographical potential of the term, “Orientalism” is examined here primarily in relation to Asian regions beyond the Middle East.
It is in this sense that the book could be retitled Alongside Orientalism. Some scholars have explored medieval European representations of the Islamic East that reveal a tendency to eroticize, romanticize, and/or demonize contemporary Islam. Note, for example, Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s wide-ranging recent exploration of a specifically medieval “Orientalism” in representations of Islam and Saracens.9 Akbari explains that she excludes European views of east Asia from her study “simply to make clear the extent to which medieval Orientalism was shaped by a very specific discourse of religious alterity centered on the relationship of Christianity to Islam.”10 That is an important distinction, one with which the present book strongly agrees, though by no means does it intend to paint the medieval era as a pre-Orientalist “golden age, free of the representational violence inventoried by Said,” as suggested by some medievalists.11
The three elements of Said’s “Orientalism” developed over different periods of time, so there cannot really be said to be a single point of origin.