Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (review)

Suzanne Akbari's study of Western views of Islam throughout the European Middle Ages is synoptic in the best sense, working comfortably with texts in Latin, Old French, Italian, German, and Middle English, and exhibiting an equally capacious grasp on secondary scholarship in an equal variety of languages. It usefully extends and carefully intervenes in the areas of scholarship laid out by the generalist studies of Richard Southern and John Tolan. Akbari examines religious polarization and geographic diversity, which combine and recombine throughout the medieval period to inform concepts of the Saracen in romance, historical, scientific, and geographical writings, and in so doing constructs an archaeology of knowledge for later incarnations of orientalism.

Akbari innovatively foregrounds her study with the spatial and cognitive geographical schema of the encyclopedists, extending them to literary texts. This spatial emphasis throughout comprises the book's most original contribution, and Akbari uses spatiality and orientation in a variety of fluid and figurative ways in the course of her study, both incorporating it into her methodology and organizational schema for the order of chapters and exploring the use of spatial metaphors and thinking within the texts she studies. The chapters trace a journey between earth (in the first chapter) and paradise (in the last chapter), taking in the complex reorganizations of space exerted by actual bodies—of Jews, of Muslims, of relics—deployed as identitarian boundary markers by Christian writers from the High to the late Middle Ages. The introduction situates the study's overall scholarly intervention into the dominant discourses of Saidian Orientalism and Foucauldian imaginative geography and the archaeology of knowledge, differentiating from later orientalisms a medieval "orientalism" that combines polarizing religious discourses with spectrum-organized geographical ones. In other words, Akbari argues that more modern East/West versions of orientalism do not fit the state of affairs in the Middle Ages where discourses of alterity were also informed by conceptualizations of geographic locations, regions, and climatological zones. These conceptualizations stress contiguity within a terrestrial continuum and productively complicate the more familiar orientalist religious agonisms. Akbari plays these competing impulses of religious polarization and geographical conceptualization against each other as she examines the idea of medieval knowledge production about the Saracen/East as a process, continually in flux, continually reorganizing itself in particular textual nodes—literary, religious, encyclopedic, and cartographic. The aim of this book therefore is the description of the parameters within which this knowledge production occurs and the tracing of dominant currents within it.

Chapter 1, "The Shape of the World," examines the different encyclopedists—including Isidore of Seville, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and Pierre D'Ailly—whose models of the world took in tripartite, quadripartite, regional, and zonal images, and informed such later writers as Gower and Mandeville. The reading of Mandeville's Travels as a series of dispersive centers is particularly useful and catches at the heart of that narrative's productive inconsistency and expansiveness. Chapter 2, "From Jerusalem to India," moves to the Alexander romance, exploring the Liber Floridus, The Roman de toute chevalerie, and Kyng Alisaunder, to describe a later medieval transition from a Jerusalem-centered world to one drawn rather toward India and the exotic reaches of the East, both of which serve as objects of cultural desire, fantasy, and fear. Chapter 3 uses climate theory to overview the diasporic Jewish body: at once culturally central and dispersed, nowhere and ubiquitous, and thus illuminates the popularity of texts describing the destruction of Jerusalem as the defining narrative for Christian views of Judaism.

Chapter 4, "The Saracen Body," launches the central argument of the book as it centers on literary images of the Saracen body in the crusade romance of Fierabras and the King of Tars. Once again, Akbari uses climate theory to outline the nature and composition of the Saracen as a figure of bellicose energy and fury. As she compares one version to another, she describes a counterplay between the expected religious...