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

“The tender beginner is he whose homeland is sweet; he is already strong for whom every place is like his native one; but he is truly perfect for whom all the world is a place of exile.” Hugh of St. Victor’s reflections are echoed in In Light of Another’s Word, which provides an insightful, thoughtful, and clear discussion of the ways in which key medieval authors considered other peoples and cultures in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Shirin Khanmohamadi offers well-researched insights into Gerald of Wales, William of Rubruck, Jean de Joinville, and Sir John Mandeville, examining especially those moments when an author considers how others are perceiving him or when the author is otherwise estranged from his more familiar ways of thinking about others. Her book makes a strong contribution to scholarship on medieval travel and European perceptions of other cultures, and it would also be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses.

The main title comes from Mikhail Bakhtin, and In Light of Another’s Word effectively, and generally without a heavy hand, employs Bakhtinian and other theories throughout while the subtitle announces a focus on European Ethnography. The term ethnography and the word empiricism used throughout the book may still feel a little anachronistic like expressions other fields use—medieval science, medieval class structure, postcolonial Middle Ages—but Khanmohamadi makes a strong case for their appropriateness and applicability. Ethnography, she says, can mean “an intent to describe and record the differing manners and customs” of various peoples. (Could Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator of the Canterbury Tales or William Langland’s dreamer be ethnographers?) Khanmohamadi, however, often sharpens the focus of late medieval ethnography to

a profound openness to alternative perspectives and voices; attention to the limits and hence dangers of taking a single-point European or Latin Christian perspective in engaging with cultural diversity; and frequent exposure of the discomfort experienced by Europeans in confronting and thinking through unfamiliar words and worldviews, in opening their own systems of thought to competing languages and having their beliefs thus “dialogized”—and relativized—through the encounter.

(2–3)

Her thesis is that the ethnography she studies frequently contains these attitudes and moments, and she explores the reasons why her authors might choose to address them.

Classical and early medieval backgrounds to late medieval ethnography are the subject of the first chapter, which surveys Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Cicero, Pliny, William of Malmesbury, Albertus Magnus, Isidore of Seville, Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland, and other writings and authors. Particular focus comes to bear on Pope Innocent IV who, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, argued that crusade against lands that were considered Christian was justified but not necessarily campaigns against pagan or Muslim places. All men are rational, he suggested, so they have rights to property and self-government unless they practice sins “contra naturam.” All lands, including non-Christian ones, nevertheless fell under the care of the Church because it was responsible for every person’s soul, so learning about others in order to convert people became key. At about the same time, Peter the Venerable in Spain had the Qur’an and other works in Arabic translated into Latin, William of Tripoli argued that Muslims could be converted because of the closeness of their religion to Christianity, and Abelard and Aquinas promulgated the qualities of virtuous pagans. These initiatives, Khanmohamadi explains, reached their height following these authors and then declined in the Early Modern era and later under Imperialism, periods which emphasized the sinful acts of non-Europeans in order forcefully to subjugate and convert them.

Where other authors have explored similarities between the ways that Gerald of Wales describes the Irish in his Topographia hibernica and the Welsh in his slightly later two works on Wales, especially the Descriptio Kambriae, Khanmohamadi emphasizes a contrast. Her second chapter characterizes his...