discovering new worlds essays on medieval exploration and imagination

Discovering new worlds : essays on medieval exploration and imagination / edited by Scott D. Westrem.

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• Garland reference library of the humanities

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• Westrem, Scott D., 1953-

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• Geography, Medieval

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• Corpus ID: 191454058

Discovering new worlds : essays on medieval exploration and imagination

• Scott D. Westrem
• Published 1991
• History, Philosophy

Discovering new worlds

Essays on medieval exploration and imagination, by scott d. westrem.

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Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination (GARLAND MEDIEVAL CASE) Hardcover – Import, 1 September 1991

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• ISBN-10 0815301022
• ISBN-13 978-0815301028
• Publisher Taylor & Francis
• Publication date 1 September 1991
• Language English
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Taylor & Francis (1 September 1991)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0815301022
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0815301028
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 788 g

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Discovering new worlds : essays on medieval exploration and imagination / edited by Scott D. Westrem

• New York : Garland, 1991
• xxxiii, 276 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
• Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 1436.
• Garland reference library of the humanities. Garland medieval casebooks ; vol. 2.

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Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination Relié – 1 septembre 1991

• Langue Anglais
• Éditeur Taylor & Francis
• Date de publication 1 septembre 1991
• ISBN-10 0815301022
• ISBN-13 978-0815301028
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• Éditeur ‏ : ‎ Taylor & Francis (1 septembre 1991)
• Langue ‏ : ‎ Anglais
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0815301022
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0815301028
• Poids de l'article ‏ : ‎ 788 g

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Discovering new worlds: essays on medieval exploration and imagination (garland reference library of the humanities) - hardcover.

• About this edition
• Publisher Garland
• Publication date 1991
• ISBN 10  0815301022
• ISBN 13  9780815301028
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition number 1
• Number of pages 276
• Editor Westrem Scott D.

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Discovering new worlds : essays on medieval exploration and imagination / edited by Scott D. Westrem.

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New York : Garland, 1991.

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74VK2DDl7B4Z

https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/74VK2DDl7B4Z

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9910 1790983970 2626

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Eastern Marvels

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• Michael Uebel  

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

30 Accesses

In 1238, England experienced a glut of herring. At coastal cities near Yarmouth, an overabundance of the fish drove prices down to almost nothing; and in areas distant from the sea herring sold at a fraction of the usual price. That year the fish merchants of Gotland and Friesland decided against making the annual trip to Yarmouth, the place from which they always returned, their ships weighed down with herring. For Matthew Paris, whose Chronica maiora records this event, the availability and price of herring did not so much illustrate the microeconomics of fish production as lay bare a mentalité underlying Western European attitudes toward what is unknown and uncontainable.

The Other is not a simple presence of a self to a self; it is not contained in a relation which starts from a distance and ends in a bringing together. The Other is radical only if the desire for it is not the possibility of anticipating it as the desirable or of thinking it out beforehand but if it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death. — John Heaton 1

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John Heaton, “The Other and Psychotherapy,” The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other , ed. Robert Bernascon and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 5–6. The other, as a central critical term in my analysis and one inherited by cultural studies from the hermeneutic philosophy of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, too often loses its historical and cultural specificity in contemporary discussions of difference. For a provocative philosophical account of alterity, see

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Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). While I would want to begin with an abstract, unlocalized definition of the other, such as the one I cite here from Tzetvan Todorov, my guiding concern is to show how medieval culture tells its own story through a history of the other: We can discover the other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogeneous substance, radically alien to whatever is not us: as Rimbaud said, Je est un autre. But others are also “ I ” s subjects just as I am, whom only my point of view—according to which all of them are out there and I alone am in here —separates and authentically distinguishes from myself. I can conceive of these others as an abstraction, as an instance of any individual’s psychic configuration, as the Other—other in relation to myself, to me or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the “normal”; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society…unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own. ( The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other , trans. Richard Howard [NewYork: Harper, 1984], p. 3)

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora , ed. Henry Richards Luard, 6 vols. (London, 1876) 3: 488. All translations, unless otherwise cited in text, are my own.

John of Piano Carpini, History of the Mongols , ch. 8 in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries , ed. and trans. Christopher Dawson (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 45.

The legend of Prester John as a Western fantasy of power dominated the imagination of crusaders from the Second to the Fifth Crusade (ca. 1150–1240). An interesting, yet as we shall see typical, conflation occurred at the time of the Fifth Crusade, as the crusaders approach Damietta. In a letter, dated April 18, 1221, sent to a number of important personages, including Pope Honorius III, Jacques de Vitry expected relief from a certain oriental prince named David, whom he identified with Prester John. David (also taken to be Prester John’s son) turned out to be none other than Genghis Khan. The letter is edited by R. B. C. Huygens, Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 1160/70-1240, évêque de S. Jean-d’Acre (Leiden: Brill, 1960), pp. 134–53. On the identification of Prester John with David and its role in the propaganda of the Fifth Crusade, see Friedrich Zarncke, “Der Priester Johannes als Vorfahr des sogenanntes König David, des Mongolen Dschingiskhan,” Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Classe der königlichen sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 8 (1883): 5–59; Martin Gosman, “La legende du Prêtre Jean et la propagande auprès des Croisés devant Damiette (1218–1221),” La croisade: réalités et fictions. Actes du Colloque d’Amiens 18–22 Mars 1987 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1989), pp. 133–42; and

R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 45–47.

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See, e.g., “The Tartar Relation” (Historia Tartarorum) , a largely ethnographic description of the Mongols written down in 1247 by a certain C. de Bridia upon the occasion of Piano Carpini’s return to Europe, in R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston, and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 97. Or this concerning the taste of Mongols for pickled human flesh in the Egerton MS version of Mandeville:“When thai ensege a castell or a walled toune, thai behete thaim that er enseged so faire proffers that it is wonder; for thai will graunt tham what-sum-ever thai asch. Bot, als sone as thai hafe yolden tham, thai slae tham and cuttez off thaire eres and layes tham in vynegre for to sowce and makez of thaim a dayntee meet for grete lordes” (The Buke of John Maundeuill. being the Travels of John Mandeville, Knight 1322–56. A Hitherto Unpublished English Version from the Unique Copy (Egerton Ms. 1982) in the British Museum… together with the French Text, Notes, and an Introduction , ed. George F. Warner [London: Roxburghe Club, 1889], p. 123). For a recent overview of Western myths of Mongol cannibalism, see

Gregory G. Guzman, “Reports of Mongol Cannibalism in the Thirteenth-Century Latin Sources: Oriental Fact or Western Fiction?” Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination ed. Scott D. Westrem, (NewYork: Garland, 1991), pp. 31–68. The figure of the cannibal, as I suggest later, is an important image in the construction of specific kinds of fantasies. The widespread figure was central to the formation of national consciousness and identity.

The existence of Gog and Magog was established on the basis of Gen. 10:1–5, Ezek. 38:1–23 and 39:1–6, and Rev. 20:7–10. On his map of Palestine, Matthew Paris depicts in the north Alexanders walls and the inclusi , and states in a rubric that from this same direction came the Tartars. See Konrad Miller, Mappae Mundi: Die ältesten Weltkarten , 6 vols. (Stuttgart, 1895–98) 3: 93. The fourteenth-century Hereford mappa mundi shows a northern European peninsula surrounded by walls and towers. The rubric occupying the area refers to the medieval legend of Gog and Magog: see

Vicomte de Santarém, Essai sur l’histoire de la cosmographie et de la cartographie pendant le Moyen-Age , ed. Martim de Albuquerque, 3 vols. [Lisbon: Administra? do Porto de Lisboa, 1989] 2: 338. On the equation of the Tartari inclusi with Gog and Magog, see

Andrew Runni Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Enclosed Nations (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy, 1932), pp. 14, 98–103.

On the development of the “siege mentality” in late-medieval and early-modern Europe see Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XlVe-XVIIIe siècles): Une cité assiégé (Paris: Fayard, 1978).

Margaret T. Hodgen characterizes the first 1,300 years of Christianity as “a prolonged interlude of continual anxiety” (Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964], p. 73).

Jacques Le Goff frames the Middle Ages in the same general terms: “the mentalities and sensibilities of medieval men were dominated by [a] sense of insecurity which determined the basis of their attitudes” ( Medieval Civilization [New York: Blackwell, 1988], p. 325). A classic statement on Western medieval “paranoid phantasy” (p. 71), here in the context of popular eschatology, is

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Seckar and Warburg, 1957), pp. 69–74.

By “ideological construction,” I refer to the “representational structures” of “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971], p. 162).

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde/Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 229; emphasis added. Or, as Dollimore puts it in a trenchant aphorism, “to be against (opposed to) is also to be against (close up, in proximity to) or, in other words, up against” (p. 229).

Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” The Practice of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 127.

Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Basic Writings , ed. David Ferreu Krell (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 332.

Louis Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 416 [397–420].

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Identifying with others can generate what Dollimore calls “a politics of proximity.” Dollimore quotes a crucial passage in Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” New Formations 5 (1988): 10–11 [5-23]:“The language of critique is effective not because it keeps for ever separate the terms of the master and the slave…but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of‘translation’: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the Other , properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the ‘moment’ of politics…This must be a sign that history is happening — within the windless pages of theory.”

See Jacques Le Goff, “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon,” Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 189–200.

Three excellent encyclopedic treatments of medieval conceptions of Eastern wonders, especially monster traditions, are Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159–97

John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and

Claude Lecouteux, Les monstres dans la littérature allemande du Moyen Age: Contribution à l’étude du merveilleux médiéval , 3 vols. (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1982).

Saint Augustine, City of God , trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 662.

On the theme of wilderness in Hebrew thought see George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 10–64; and

Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 157–62. The prominence of the city/wilderness opposition in Greek thought should also be mentioned. The opposition between civilized and barbarian translates to one of inside/outside: in the city-state a man could achieve full humanity as a “political animal” (Aristotle); outside the city lawlessness precluded the possibility of a man ever realizing his full humanity. Inside he could be a political subject, outside only a curious object (see White, “The Forms Of Wildness,” p. 169).

See, e.g., the account of Muhammad’s origins and rise to power in cap. 2 of William of Tripoli’s Tractatus de statu Saracenorum et de Mahomete pseudo-propheta et eorum lege et fide in Hans Prutz, Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), pp. 575–98, esp. 576.

The conflation of Saracens and dogs occurs in the French chansons de geste , where the Muslims are frequently portrayed as barking like dogs when they rush into battle. See C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste,” Speculum 17 (1942): 205 [201–225].

This sense of monstrum as something to behold is conveyed in the primary meanings of the word and its cognates. In addition to ModE “monster,” these include a visit or view, a sample (s.v. “monstrum” in R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources [London: Oxford University Press, 1965]); a celestial phenomenon (s.v.“monstrum” in Novum Glossarium latinitatis [Hafni: Munkgaard, 1900-]); pieces of evidence (s.v. “monstra” in

Jan Frederik Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus: A Medieval Latin-French/English Dictionary [Leiden: Brill, 1976]); ecclesiastical monstrance (s.v.“monstrum (2)” in Glossarium mediae et infitnae latinitatis , ed. Charles du Cange et al. [Paris: Firmin Didot, 1840–50]).

Anthropologist Michael Taussig (The Nervous System [NewYork: Routledge, 1992]) uses the term “nervous system” as a figure for the historical condition of terror, which he asserts is the other in the postmodern age. Such a nervous system is structured upon a dialectic of disorder and order, hysteria and numbing acceptance, centered reason and “decentered randomness.” He refers to “a state of doubleness of social being in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a rumor, a sight, something said, or not said—something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it” (p. 18). Taussig’s “optics of the nervous system” provides a postmodern analog to medieval forms of imagining the other. See esp. pp. 11–22.

Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I,’” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 70.

India, though the most important for the construction of the Prester John myth, is hardly the only neutral space in the Middle Ages; others include St. Brendan’s island, the Purgatory of St. Patrick, the Land of Cocaigne, the Fortunate Isles, Ireland, and Columbus’s West Indies. A good, if outdated, survey of these spaces is George Boas, Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (New York: Octagon, 1948).

See John Kirtland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe (New York: American Geographical Society, 1925), p. 272. Wright’s citation of an exception to the threefold division of India is mistaken. The Elysaeus account of Prester John’s kingdom, cited as evidence of a twofold division, in fact maintains the traditional threefold one:“Indiae tres sunt.” For a sense of the shifting geographical limits defining the three Indias, see

Jean Richard, “L’extrème-orient légendaire au moyen âge: Roi David et Prêtre Jeun,” Annales d’Ethiopie 2 (1957): 226–27 [225-42].

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 79.

Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Nazi Myth,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 297 [291–312].

Georges Dumézil (The Destiny of the Warrior , trans. Alf Hiltebeitel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]) writes that “the function of…myths is to express dramatically the ideology under which a society lives; not only to hold out to its conscience the values it recognizes and the ideals it pursues from generation to generation, but above all to express its very being and structure, the elements, the connections, the balances, the tensions that constitute it; to justify the rules and traditional practices without which everything within a society would disintegrate” (p. 3).

Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Utopias and Utopian Thought , ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 25. See also the third essay, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” in his Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 131–58.

See the brief discussion of this topos in Hans Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages , trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), pp. 160–61.

Aymeri de Narbonne , ed. Louis Demaison, 2 vols. (Paris, 1887) 1: 55; ll.1277, 1283–84, cf. 1. 2426. For other examples of the India topos and the extent of its use, see André Moisan, Repertoire des noms propres de personnes et de lieux cités dans les chansons de geste fran?ses et les oeuvres étrangères dérivées , 5 vols. (Genève: Droz, 1986) 2: 1199, s.v. “Inde, Ynde”; and Ernest Langlois, Table des noms propres de toute nature compris dans les chansons de geste imprimées (1904; Genève: Slatkine, 1974), p. 359, s.v. “Inde, Ynde.”

See, e.g., two of the earliest and clearest statements on the subject in Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage , trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (1908; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) and

Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), pp. 94–130.

See Friedman, Monstrous Races , pp. 37–58. For good discussions of the significance of medieval cartography, see Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Mappamundi und Chronographia,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968): 118–86; and her “‘…ut describeretur universus orbis’: Zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 7 (1970): 249–78.

Roger Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon , trans. Robert Belle Burke, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928) 1: 320. Compare Statements in Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 2.80.189–91, in Natural History , trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949) 1: 321–23; and Albertus Magnus, De natura loci , tract. 1 cap. 2, in De natura loci/De causis proprietatum elementorum/De generatione et corruptione

ed. Paul Hossfeld, vol. 5, pt. 2 of Opera Omnia (Aschendorff: Monasterii Westfalorum, 1980), pp. 3–4.

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Uebel, M. (2005). Eastern Marvels. In: Ecstatic Transformation. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11140-1_2

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