In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages by Shirin A. Khanmohamadi (review)

Shirin A. Khanmohamodi’s first book is a major reworking of her PhD dissertation (Columbia University, 2005). The book improves upon her dissertation, notably in the omission of a slightly awkward chapter on Marie de France’s Lais in favour of a new chapter on Jean de Joinville’s La vie de Saint Louis. The result is a tighter series of reworked essays that also examine the Descriptio Kambriae of Gerard of Wales, the Iterarium of William of Rubruck, and the Travels of John of Mandeville, thus focusing on a genre of medieval writing from the end of the twelfth up to the mid-fourteenth century that some still refer to as ‘travel literature’. The inclusion of Rubruck nonetheless uncomfortably expands the book into realms that cry out for consideration of other authors like the extraordinary Odoric of Pordenone or John of Montecorvino, but such gaps have been recently and admirably filled, for example, by Kim M. Phillips’s Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Khanmohamadi adopts a recent critical position, styling these examples of medieval travel literature as ‘medieval ethnography’, which she also classes as a genre of anthropological writing. She is not alone in doing so, joined by notables like Robert Bartlett and Joan-Pau Rubiés. Some readers might object, however, to her rudimentary definitions of ethnography as ‘discourse on observed manners and customs’, and anthropology as ‘the set of ideas and theories attempting to account for cultural diversity of the unity of the “human”’ (p. 11). Whether medieval theologies, cosmologies, and other systems of thought (especially experiential scholasticism in the mode of Roger Bacon) can be subsumed into a theory of discourses is beside the point: the modern terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘anthropology’ evoke a teleology that risks refashioning the past in the image of the present. While all history tends in this direction, these sorts of terminological impasses thwart the historiographical dialogue of the past and present.

In this same vein, there is a strongly secularising thread running through Khanmohamadi’s book. Khanmohamadi overplays the influence of ‘pagan’ classical literature upon late medieval travel literature while conversely ignoring the thread of scholastic theology in the writings of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps the most notable omission is St Augustine, who was well known for his position in his City of God that even monsters were God’s people. Similar theological views permeate the thinking of Roger Bacon.

It is difficult to understand Khanmohamadi’s reasons for adopting such an approach, but the results are sometimes problematic, as, for example, in the chapter on William of Rubruck’s account of his travels to the Mongol Khan. Saliently, she emphasises the place of self-reflection and self-visualisation in the mendicant art of preaching. Aron Gurevich has already noted how this practice had transformed preaching in European contexts. It permits Khanmohamadi to identify several instances of conscious self-representation and reflective engagement with Mongol hosts in William’s account. Yet, one cannot help noting that it is William writing about William in his Iterarium: sometimes more critical space needed to be placed between what William portrayed and the reality of a man that was initially seen as an odd ascetic who, for example, to the amusement of his Mongol hosts, chose not to wear shoes in the biting frost and, as A. J. Watson pointed out in the Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011), did not understand Mongol gift culture. For Franciscans like William, the exemplary life of their founder, especially his travelling to Egypt to preach before the Sultan, provided a model for the order’s interaction with the world’s peoples. Franciscans like Ramon Lull recognised the centrality of language in this experience, although this is one of the weakest aspects...