In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Earthly Symmetry and the Mirror of Marvelous Diversity in and Around Ynde HAVING CAPPED ITS TOUR OF THE biblical East, as we saw in the previous chapter, with the long coda on Saracen beliefs, The Book returns once again to the instructive itinerary, announcing its intention to fulfill Sir John's initial promise in the Continental and Insular exordium by describing part of the diverse East beyond the Holy Land, a broadening of geographical focus that represents the Mandeville-author's principal innovation.' As this broadened focus has already been anticipated several times since the exordium, it is handled no differently from any previous shift in the text, being presented as a natural progression that entails only a minor change in subject, from territory and routes to territory and diversity (the themes advertised in Rustichello 's prologue to Polo): "now it is time, if you like, to speak to you of the marches[,] of the isles, and diverse animals and diverse peoples beyond these marches" ("ore il est temps, si vous plest, de vous emparler des marches[,] des isles, et diuerses bestes et diuerses gentz en outre ces marches")? Diversity there certainly is in the "isles" surveyed in The Book's latter sections, and the Continental and Insular Versions give a foretaste of it in the short mappamundi-like geographical overview (a kind of inner exordium) that precedes the return to the itinerary, where, for example, Amazonia is mentioned and defined as "the land of Feminy, where there are no men but women only" ("la terre de Femynie, ou y ni ad nuls hommes qe femmes soulement "). After this transitional overview, the text sets out for the farther East exactly as it did for "la terre doutre mer:' by addressing intending travelers, although its instructions were first being set down as changing conditions in Asia were making such Polo-esque journeys impossible: "Whoever would like to go then toward Tartary, toward Persia, toward Chaldea, and toward Ynde, should put to sea at Genoa or Venice ..." ("Quy voroit donqes aler vers Earthly Symmetry and the Mirror of Marvelous Diversity 125 Tartaire, vers Persye, vers Caldee, et vers Ynde, il se mette en mer a Ianewe au '\7.' ") 3 venlse. .. . This continuation of the text as traveler's guide is increasingly difficult to sustain, however, and the subsequent: itinerary provides only the vaguest indications of the actual route. In part, the vagueness stems from the state of medieval knowledge about the earth east of the Holy Land, but its immediate cause is the nature of the Mandeville-author's template for the tour from Trebizond out: the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone's Relatio (1330), used, like William's Liber, mostly in Jean le Long's slightly modified rendering, Le chemin de la peregrinacion et du voyage (1351). In the brief preamble to his dictated memoir, Odoric claims to have traveled "to the regions of the infidel ... so that [he] might gain some fruit of souls" ("ad partes infidelium . ut fructus aliquos lucrifacere[t] animarurn") - "par Ie commandement du . Pape," in Ie Long's text-but it is uncertain whether this was the purpose of his fifteen-year journey through India, south-east Asia, and China. His professed motive apart, the friar's relation says little about Christian labors in the mission field, the main exception being a long set piece on the martyrdom of four Franciscans in India. Instead, as the preamble pledges, Odoric describes "mirabilia" that he has heard about or seen, laying out his Polo-esque material in the manner of William's Liber, along a first-person narrative of his itinerary , and sometimes revealing glimpses of himself-as, for instance, when he admits to having failed to convince a Chinese monk that human souls are not reincarnated in animals: "But I could have said so many things to him in this "'Nay, because he would never believe a thing" ("Sic autem isto modo dicere poteram sibi multa, quod nunquam aliud credere volcbat").' In overwriting Odoric's pious, marvelous, disorderly, and sometimes personal book-which in style and insight is inferior to both the Liber and the writings of his Franciscan predecessors in Asia, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck-the Mandeville-author proceeds as before, except that he handles his underlying source with still greater freedom and no longer follows it step by step throughout. He again replaces the actual traveler moving in the past tense with a prospective traveler in the present tense, and works...

Share