Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity by Simon Gaunt (review)

In recent years, scholars of medieval studies have lamented the modern and often nationalistic boundaries that currently divide academic disciplines, seeking new ways to teach and study medieval texts that challenge divisions imposed on them. Simon Gaunt’s Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde: Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity responds to the need for cross-disciplinary dialogue by offering a provocative philological and theoretical study of the earliest Franco-Italian Marco Polo account. Gaunt’s careful consideration of the Devisement’s vernacular traditions paints the portrait of a text that is inherently hybrid and mobile, and works across cultural, linguistic and regional divides. Gaunt convincingly argues that otherness in the Devisement is not symptomatic of a binary logic, as medieval postcolonial scholarship has suggested, but rather of a keen interest in diversity. Putting aside the “post-medieval literary historical and cultural turf wars” (28) that have long plagued Marco Polo scholarship and medieval studies, this fresh approach to the Devisement is an inspiring example of how dissolving disciplinary divisions can more accurately portray the complexity that characterizes medieval texts.

Gaunt first turns away from the traditional focus on the content of the Marco Polo account in order to highlight the underappreciated effects of an unstable narrative voice and a hybrid language (36). Building on previous philological research, Gaunt thoroughly examines the ambivalent narrative voice in order to uncover the unusual narrative quality that sets the Franco-Italian tradition apart from later vernacular translations. Gaunt makes the compelling claim that the challenging voice and language of the Franco-Italian Devisement has the effect of inviting the reader to engage with the text on a deeper level, question its sources, invent supplemental scenarios, and metaphorically accompany Marco Polo on his journey (55–57). Gaunt’s astute observations fill a gap in previous studies of the Devisement that have neglected to consider the intricacy of the narrative form and how it influences reader engagement.

Language choice constitutes another structural element of interest in this study, and Gaunt’s comparison of different translations shows how the Franco-Italian text “stresses the plurality of differences to be found in the East, with les diversités in the plural” (88). This overlapping of language and content reinforces Gaunt’s concept of linguistic mobility, which entails the fluid transfer of text between languages and the traces it leaves in subsequent translations (78). Gaunt’s meticulous study of language across different Marco Polo traditions highlights the nuances of each translation and gives new depth to the Devisement as a multi-lingual text. Gaunt concludes that the first Italian redactors chose to write in French because it was “the vernacular language of the translation zone” (110). According to this interpretation, French was valuable not only because it reached a wide readership, but also because it adopted a destabilizing effect that echoed the ambivalence of the narrative voice.

Having established the distinctiveness of the Franco-Italian narrative voice, Gaunt revisits the topics of marvels and other religions that have long interested specialists. Gaunt challenges current understandings of the medieval marvel and associates it with an epistemological challenge, “something to be computed and understood, rather than an absolute category of beings or objects per se” (120). Drawing from the illustrations of the Devisement’s courtly French manuscripts, Gaunt provocatively suggests that the marvels of the Marco Polo account confuse the reader’s expectations, particularly with regards to the Great Khan who embodies the marvels of the East (125). The Khan’s uncanny quality, which Gaunt develops in his analysis of the defeat of Khan’s Christian kinsman Nayan, “blurs the boundaries between the familiar and the foreign, troubling the line that is usually drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ when other cultures and non-Christian religions are represented in medieval texts” (127). This analysis, along with the observation that the Devisement has a “sense… of the relative value of, and similarities between, different religions” (140), successfully problematizes recent postcolonial...