In Light of Another's Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages

Notes

no t e s introduction 1. A phrase I have adapted from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In describing Roman cultural bilingualism, Bakhtin writes: “From its very first steps, the Latin literary word viewed itself in the light of the Greek word, through the eyes of the Greek word; it was from the very beginning a word ‘with a sideways glance’” (italics mine). See “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse ,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 41−83, quotation on 61. 2. See, for instance, Karma Lochrie, “Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville’s Cosmopolitan Utopia,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 592–99; and María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002). For my reading of cosmopolitanism in late medieval ethnography and travel, see Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, “Worldly Unease in Late Medieval European Travel Reports,” in Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages, ed. John Ganim and Shayne Legassie, New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 105−20. 3. The concept of the “contact zone” has been deployed productively by critics of travel and encounter narratives such as Mary Louise Pratt to show how subjects newly brought together in a “spatial and temporal copresence . . . are constituted in and by their relations to each other” (7)—in a word, dialogically. Setting out to complicate diffusionist models of topdown , colonizer-to-colonized cultural influence, Pratt insists on the twodirectional nature of cultural influence even in highly asymmetrical, modern colonial encounters. See Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 4–6. 4. The nature and sources of medieval ethnographic thinking and writing have recently been undergoing scholarly definition and elaboration. For a comprehensive introduction to medieval Europe’s ethnography and its debt to classical sources, see Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), especially 155–210, and The Making of Europe: Conquest , Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Allen Lane, Notes to Introduction 150 1993). Joan-Pau Rubiés has recently published a number of important studies, among them the collection Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2009) (which includes J. K. Hyde’s essay “Ethnographers in Search of an Audience,” 65–119), Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250– 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and “Travel Writing and Ethnography,” in Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242– 60; as well as Jas Elsner and Rubiés, introduction to Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Rubiés and Elsner (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 1–56. See also Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Medieval Ethnography ,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 13.3 (1982): 275–86; and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recent Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006), chapter 1, “Acts of Separation,” 11–42. A number of scholars have responded to the ethnographic work of Mandeville’s Travels. See Ian Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The Diversity of Man in the Book of John Mandeville,” in Eastward Bound, Travel and Travellers from 1050–1550, ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 156–76; and Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), “Eye on the World: Mandeville’s Pleasure Zones; Or, Cartography, Anthropology, and Medieval Travel Romance,” 239−305. 5. Rubiés, “Travel Writing and Ethnography,” 257–58. 6. Manners and customs discourse has long been recognized as residing at the heart of ethnographic writing, whether in its classical origins (Herodotus , Tacitus) or its early modern expression. See Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Roger Bacon, the preserver of William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium in his Opus Maius, for instance, renamed William ’s Itinerarium “De Moribus Tartarorum” (On the customs of the Tartars [Mongols]). See Opus Maius, ed. John Henry Bridges, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897–1900), 1:400–401, 2:368, 371, 376, 383. See Peter Jackson, introduction to William, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), 1–55, on 53–54. Medieval Europeans, Robert Bartlett has argued, saw customs...