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N o t e s IntroduCtIon 1. Marco Polo speaks to Khubilai Khân, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 2002), 135. 2. A vast literature exists on these subjects. Among important recent contributions see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) and John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Some other major works include: Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960); R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); John V. Tolan, ed., Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1996); Jeremy Cohen, ed., From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christianity, Wolfenb ütteler Mittelalter-Studien 11 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996); John Christian Laurenson and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); David R. Blanks and Michael Frasetto, eds., Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perceptions of Other (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 113–46; Rosamund Allen, ed., Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Josiah Blackmore, Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 3. Tolan, Saracens, 18. He directs our attention to comments by William Green on similar tendencies in Rabbinic Judaism, as well as Jonathan Smith’s remark, “The radically ‘other’ is merely ‘other’; the proximate ‘other’ is problematic, and hence, of supreme interest ” (Saracens, 290n76). 4. See in particular Tolan, Saracens; Akbari, Idols; Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare A. Iannucci (with the assistance of John Tulk), eds., Marco Polo and the Encounter of 204 Notes to Pages 4–5 East and West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); and Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 5. Christopher LaMonica, “Colonialism,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, http://www. oxfordbibliographiesonline.com (accessed 23 April 2012). 6. Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Introduction, trans. Shelley L. Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997), 16–17. 7. Ibid., 4–12. 8. For example, Joshua Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1972); Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229– 1492 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987); Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay, eds., Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); David Abulafia, Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean, 1100– 1500 (London: Variorum, 1993). However, it is worth noting, as Simon Gaunt points out in his incisive review essay, “Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” Comparative Literature 61 (2009): 160–76, at 164, that “colonization” is not necessarily the best term for movements such as those of the Norman aristocracy into England after 1066 and, subsequently, AngloNorman elite migrations into Wales and Ireland. He prefers Bartlett’s “aristocratic diaspora” (Making of Europe, 24–59). Bartlett, almost in passing, defines “cultural symptoms of colonialism ” as “small immigrant élites with close ties to the metropolis and large discontented populations of a different language and religious affiliation” (Making of Europe, 185). 9. The foundational volume was Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Gaunt’s recent review essay “Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” examines the potential and problems inherent in medieval postcolonial studies; a more favorable survey is Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Medieval postcolonial studies includes work by scholars of medievalism who argue that “the Middle Ages” itself has been constructed as “Other” by Renaissance and later scholars in contrast with postmedieval (humanist, enlightenment, modern) identities. Two such studies are Kathleen Biddick , The Shock of Medievalism...

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