Blogging from Haiti

I don't feel like writing an update today. I am feeling too philosophical and lethargic. But I'm not going to go without posting, because that would be irresponsible!

So, as a compromise, I am reposting, from my Haiti blog, a little note that I wrote about Mandeville from my tent in Croix des Bouquets. In sum, I spent a few weeks in Haiti in June 2010, and aside from all the crushing sadness and beauty of the trip, one of my biggest challenges was settling on what I should bring to read. I settled for Cohen, Rilke and Borges, but I also brought my Mandeville. In the end, I'm glad I did, because I was actually very moved by the experience of reading travel literature while I was traveling and of encountering, understanding and communicating new things in much the same way that Mandeville does in the text.

I include this now because, having read and annotated the first half of the text while in Haiti, I intend to complete my work on that edition during my upcoming travels on the Big Island. So, more reflective drivel to come, I'm sure.

Anyway, from 15 June, my first full day in Haiti:

Mostly I brought poetry, things I can read and reread, but I also brought an old copy of Mandeville’s Travels. It was published in 1919 – so, ninety years ago – and though I didn’t realize it when I bought it, it’s never been read. It’s all in Middle English, which means that I am reading it slowly and savouring every sentence, but it’s also a neat and tactile interaction with my book because I’m sitting with a knife in my lap and cutting the sealed quartos of the book to turn the pages.

For those of you unfamiliar with my obsession of the last nine or ten months, Mandeville’s Travels is a thirteenth century travel narrative detailing the voyage of an English knight through the Holy Land to India and China and back to England again. Though the author adopted “Mandeville” as a pseudonym (pseudopersona?) and essentially plagiarized much of his account, it is rooted in a literary tradition spanning herbals, genuine travel accounts, encyclopedias, hagiography, and many other types of writing.

In his “travels” (or what he represents as his travels), Mandeville describes the places and people he encounters with incredible detail. What seduces me is the botanical narrative, and the rich vegetation that permeates the text. Often one reads descriptions of unusual fruits, plants, exotic animals – things modern travelers still encounter, and still struggle to describe. Now, as I am in a context where I’m doing the same thing – seeing sights I never could have imagined, and rediscovering things (like mangoes!) in their native environment only to realize how different they are...I feel even more of a kinship with Mandeville.

Initially, I found the Travels interesting because Mandeville seems in many senses to share my travel values. That is, the things I most appreciate about traveling and the things I tend to notice strike some people as unusual. I have a passing interest in monuments, historical places, beautiful architecture – but I am more allured by the idea of peoples, the rich variety of culture, and the incredible natural beauty all around me. I tend to spend most of my time examining native flora, overturning stones on the beach to pick out their different qualities, looking at how people interact with their environment in meaningful ways. The Mandevillean style of traveler, even if invented in this text, is totally sensible to me. Especially now, I enjoy vicariously experiencing the exotic, and exploring someone else’s attempt to define it and express it.

Mandeville's Thought of the Limit

Mandeville’s Thought of the Limit: The Discourse of Similarity and Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville
By Sebastian Sobecki, for Review of English Studies (2002)

Any article which uses the word “epistemology” in every paragraph is guaranteed to give me a headache.

Okay, so Sobecki is concerned with Foucault and the term “transgression” as it applied to literature’s experience of Self and Other. For Sobecki’s purposes, “‘Transgression’ denotes the movement of crossing the limit between that which is known or familiar to us, the Same, and that which is unknown or does not want to be known, the Other” (330). By that definition, one might consider that “Travelling is transgression. A travel narrative, even if it portrays a purely imaginary voyage, is the verbalization and textualization of transgression, of the crossing of borders and limits” (330).

So, without getting into the questions of Mandeville’s identity or the truthfulness of the narrative, we can consider the Travels to be a transgressive act that brings readers into contact with critical questions of Selfhood – and of Otherness. Sobecki pays detailed attention to the ways in which Mandeville adheres to medieval conventions in this regard, and which aspects of his narrative mark important departures that signal the beginning of a cultural shift toward modern ideas of the Self/Other binary:

“. . . medieval writers’ categories of perception frequently reflect group values and group tendencies to assert auctoritas for themselves. Their so-called ‘lack of originality’ and their routine invocation of past masters are expressions of their own ‘anxiety of influence’” (331). This mentality is reflected in the understanding of the Other: “‘Originality’, the unorthodox, the new, the dangerous – all those are names for the Other, which poses a permanent threat to cultures still in the process of consolidating their identity” (331). Europe boasts just such a culture, especially since it is “organized by a superstructural ideology . . . religion” (331).

And so, we have Mandeville, and his voyage – and act of transgression – that causes his readers, wrapped comfortably in their selfhood, to butt up against the alarming Other. In this context, “Reading becomes the psychological medium for the complex encounter with one’s macrospatial world view” (331), and “the narrative persona [of Mandeville] experiences the Other representatively for the reader” (331).

“In the Travels, the secret limit at the heart of transgression is permeable from both sides of the divide. With astonishing ease, Mandeville presents the limit not as a border between the mutually exclusive ‘us’ and ‘them’, but as a point at which cultural exchange is possible” (334). This is one of the key points at which Mandeville departs from the conventions observed by his predecessors and contemporaries alike. “This cultural dialogue is grounded in Mandeville’s enormous talent for empathy with the heavily stereotyped and even imagined Other” (334).

Where does the Other exist? The cultures Mandeville encounters (and the spaces they inhabit) have been described by some scholars as ‘mirror societies’; however, this term is problematic, as it assumes “an inversion of one’s own society” (334). This is not what Mandeville presents. Rather, “They are by far more complex in structure in purpose, and they illustrate a whole range of theological and moral concerns immediate to Mandeville’s contemporaries rather than simply mirroring Western Christendom” (334).

In bringing the reader to a point of exchange with Otherness, Mandeville employs the “brilliant stratagem of inverting the roles of reader and text” (338). Understanding the Other as represented in the text leads to an inevitable reflection on Self. “The result is a lateral shift in the experience of reading the text from ‘I read the text’ Mandeville takes his reader to ‘the text reads me’. This transition from reader-as-reader to reader-as-text forms part of the reversal of the subject (similarity) and the object (difference) of the intricate grammar of the Travels’ epistemological discourse” (338). The resulting intimacy of Self and Other creates a different space from that existing within other travel narratives.

Sobecki points to an important example that illustrates Mandeville’s means of approaching the Other which also happens to overlap with my botanical interest in the text. This relates to Mandeville’s language in the passage in which he introduces the reader to the concept of bananas. No term yet exists for this specific object, though obvious words suggest themselves that would give readers a simple understanding – for example, as Sobecki suggests, he might have referred to them as “yellow fruit”. However, rather than relating bananas in terms that embellish their strangeness or blandly generalize them, he seeks similarities between the known and the similar, and the exotic (in this case, the banana). So it is that he makes bananas into a Christian symbol, which displays in its center the Holy Cross. So it is than an exotic object, on the one hand representing the Other, becomes in Mandeville’s narrative a link to the Self as well.

This is consistent throughout the Travels: “Instead of propagating difference Mandeville stresses similarity. He draws a map of our limitations as every encounter with the Other generously contributes to more clarify on the mappa mundi of medieval epistemology” (342). Further, “This shift from the episteme of difference . . . to the new and more self-confident episteme of curiositas, which does not attempt to explain away the Other as a menace to religious and political stability, underlies Mandeville’s astonishing encounters with foreign cultures. Curiositas urges the traveller to explore the limits and to engage willingly with the Unknown” (342).

Today is no different, really. It’s the difference between a business trip, a package vacation, a “humanitarian holiday” and a solo backpacker setting out with a one-way ticket. Your purpose and your personal philosophy dictate, at least, what kind of traveller you become – though I’m not clever enough to say how they speak to our modern culture. At the end of the day, I hope I can be a Mandeville and not a Margery, and as I turn my thoughts to my next foray into new places, I hope my transgressive acts push the limits between Self and Other and allow me to feel out the shape of the Unknown – even if I secretly still believe it’s Unknowable.

Science and the Sense of Self (article)

Science and the Sense of Self: The Medieval Background of a Modern Confrontation
By Lynn White Jr., for Daedalus (1978)

This article is a bit heady, but is mostly comprised of a discussion of the medieval conceptions of nature, the individual and the sacred, and the origins of scientific thought in Europe. It makes some interesting notes on the desacralization of nature that speak to the world culture inherited by Mandeville.

One of the early interesting discussions concerns the Law of Nature as articulated by Roger Bacon. This Law is “inherent in God’s purpose for all his creatures” (48) and “God is chiefly praised by the perfection with which his creatures exist according to the laws that he has established for and in them” (48). This may be a stretch, but I think that the mark of Christ on pre-Christian nature and peoples may be evidence of the same.

White marks a cultural shift from pagan to Christian values as they prevail in wider society, a shift that dramatically changes how people conceive of nature. While it forms the foundation of pagan beliefs, which celebrate the spirits of place and animistic power, nature is desacralized through “belief in an all-powerful and absolutely transcendent God” (49). In Judaism and, later, Christianity, nature is mastered – not worshipped.

As White notes, “Since they awaited the end of the world momentarily, the early Christians had little interest in science, the study of something that would shortly turn to ashes” (49). However, this thought is part of an interesting sequence. Though the lasting import of science is undermined, it remains a marker, in some sense, of Christ’s presence in the world (through study of nature). A false dichotomy is created between the natural and the sacred. Or, nature and natural objects are not permitted to be sacred in themselves – only in the degree to which they manifest Christ within them.

But as nature is desacralized, and natural spaces and wilderness, the desecration of what is pristine and wild is normalized through essentially violent and disruptive acts such as pilgrimage and crusades and expansion of civilization. Intrusion into wilderness, which has been robbed of its animistic power, becomes a means of empowering (falsely but demonstratively) the Christian faith.

This weird suspension between the sacred and profane in the power granted to nature creates an uncomfortable space for Mandeville to inherit in his discussion of nature and natural objects in the Travels. He is, in effect, a secular traveler (though he does discuss pilgrimage and revelation); his purpose is not to edify but delight, and many of the most compelling elements of his narrative are natural ones. He is not part of “the great waves of pilgrims . . . who swept eastward to experience for themselves the dust and heat and thirst of the roads of Palestine, and who walked the Via Dolorosa on bloody knees” (52).

He is not clearly part of the crowed who asserted that “Piety demanded empirical experience” (52). But he walks a fine line between reason and revelation that serves as an early enough marker of an important schism in Western thought and culture. One could locate that schism earlier in the works of philosophers, theologians and scientific thinkers, but I think its clear manifestation in literature is more telltale of its prevalence in the wider culture.

Shit, this makes my head hurt.

A Fifteenth Century Botanical Glossary (article)

A Fifteenth Century Botanical Glossary
By Jerry Stannard, for Isis (1964)

In this article Stannard discusses “a glossary of plants, minerals, and animal products used as drugs plus a few miscellaneous items denoting pharmaceutical equipment and other matters of interest to the physician and apothecary” (353-4). This glossary, contained in a manuscript dating to 1475, takes the form of columned entries that name and describe specific items (for example, a plant, and its corresponding medicinal properties, means of identification, provenance, synonyms, and other information).

Says Stannard, “Of the 309 entries, the majority, some 278, refer to plants” (354). Stannard then goes on to discuss some of the sources for the information contained in the botanical glossary and a brief timeline of the native Anglo-Saxon botanical tradition.

What interests me about this article is the mentions it makes of culture. For example, Stannard writes:

“To the rustic or to those who looked for edification from a world endowed with moral reminders, the shape of the leaves often suggested animal, bird, or human forms. From these resemblances, usually quite fanciful, moral allegories were often developed” (360).

I think we see this to some extent in the Travels, at least in the instances of moral nature that occur at reasonably frequent intervals. This explains, for example, the supposed cross-shape visible in the center of a banana cut cross-wise, which points us to the readiness of people in the region to receive the Christian faith.

Stannard also discusses “the doctrine of signatures. According to this belief, a plant indicates by its mere external appearance the disease or portion of the body for which it was intended and for which it was, for that reason, of special therapeutic value” (361). I’m not sure this has specific application to Mandeville, but it does give a name to a phenomenon of which I was already aware and struggled to communicate clearly on the surprisingly frequent occasions on which it arises in daily conversation. No, really – you’d be surprised how often I’ve discussed “the doctrine of signatures” and didn’t know what the hell to call it.

Later in the article, Stannard mentions analogy:

“The use of analogy in plant description is as old as Theophrastus and is a particularly common device in nonbotanical writings when mention of a plant is required, but where science can be, momentarily at least, ignored or subordinated to poetry” (362). Again, of no specific application to Mandeville (or at least nothing obviously striking), but I think this idea is present in the Travels: though SJM sometimes plays the naturalist, he plays just as often the poet and storyteller. Plants often become cultural objects, not scientific specimens.

Lastly, Stannard points to the medieval “belief that by examining the etymology of the name of a drug, something of value might be learned concerning its medicinal uses” (365). Such a practice might not point to the modern, scientifically proven properties of the plant, but it might well point to how the plants were received as useful, practicable cultural objects.

So, A Fifteenth Century Botanical Glossary. Though it is an examination of a primary text with no relation to the Travels, still it contains some interesting tools for thinking about how plants are given over to the audience by Mandeville.

The Lemon in China and Elsewhere (article)

The Lemon in China and Elsewhere
By Berthold Laufer, for Journal of the American Oriental Society (1934)

Okay, let me preface this (because I can never focus, damnit) by saying that I have a few articles by Laufer on a variety of topics and I quite like him.

The Lemon in China and Elsewhere: this article is mostly irrelevant, but it presents a discussion of the earliest records of lemons as a medicinal and edible resource in Indian, Chinese, Arabic and European literature. It makes useful reference to Friar Odoric and Ibn Battuta.

(Speaking of which, votes: should I re-read Ibn Battuta? His travel narrative was assigned to me by an enthusiastic art history professor who was teaching a class on Islamic art that I ended up dropping like acid. But I still read Ibn Battuta, because he seemed cool, and my vague, useless recollection of the text is positive. Thoughts?)

I’m skipping over the majority of the article and jumping to the last few pages, where Laufer brings in some of the later European threads of the lemon story. If it becomes important later, note to self: the majority of the article is a detailed chronicle of the lemon as it moves through Eastern literature.

On to Europe: “The earliest references to lemons in India on the part of European travelers are by the two friars, Odoric of Pordenone and Jordanus” (157). Arabic writers note the fruit much earlier (lemons make frequent appearances in Arabian Nights) and Ibn Battuta, like Odoric, details their use in deterring and removing stubborn leeches. Jordanus speaks to the diversity of lemons – some sweet, some sour. Eventually, as Laufer notes, the lemon migrates to Europe and becomes well established in Italy and then Germany and France. It is not until the reign of James I that lemons are definitely cultivated in England.

Is Laufer still alive? He might document the migration of lemons to North America, right to the point that coastal eccentric Jean-Marc planted a huge organic fruit garden/grove in his greenhouse on Denny Island, across the channel from Bella Bella.

European Voyages in the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea (article)

European Voyages in the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea (12th – 15th Centuries)
By Jean Richard, for Iran (1968)

Lord, is this article in rough shape. I read it during one of the moment where I gave in to my base urges: I dragged my ridiculously comfortable second-hand recliner in front of my woodstove, poured myself a glass of wine, and did my reading curled up like a cat in front of the fire. A spark burned a hole through the first three pages of the article, and there are enthusiastic wine stains on most of the pages too. Sorry, Jean Richard.

Most of the research I did over the summer was conducted in my tent, which was pitched at the edge of a cliff overlooking Fitzhugh and Hakai Pass, or on thumping, cacophonous boat rides between Bella Bella and far-flung coastal wilderness gems like Koeye and Goose Island. My copy of the Metrical Version of the Travels spent a brief moment in the sea (I caught it before it sank over the side of the boat) and some of my books still carry a lingering wisp of driftwood firesmoke, splashes of single malt, and the fresh scent of big wilderness.

It’s okay. In a way, it’s like field research. Parts of my thesis will be written while I am in transit, a road- (or ocean-) weary traveler reflecting (with some fondness for embellishment) on matters of dubious import and relevance.

Anyway, on to the European Voyages. This article provides a brief catalogue and discussion of the European presence in the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea during the period mentioned in the title. It also makes interesting notes on European use of indigenous trade routes in the area.

Of momentary interest to my research is Richard’s thought on William of Rubruck’s contributions to geography and cartography: Rubruck is the first to note that the Caspian Sea is not, in fact, a gulf leading to the “Oceanic Sea” but a sea itself. Also, Richard makes some brief remarks about the center of the pepper trade on the Malabar coast, “a place where there had lived a rich and influential Christian community since the sixth century” (47).

It’s official: my completely useless preamble is significantly longer than my reflections on the article I’m meant to be discussing. I should probably send a fruit basket or a sorry bundle of posies to my unwitting committee. I’m fun to talk to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first draft on my thesis is primarily comprised of an enthusiastic attempt to phonetically transcribe the amazing sounds the ravens make on my roof to wake me up every morning.

Interlude

Reflective Interlude (because sometimes your stomach twists in a knot when you look at the daunting stack of articles on your desk, and you have to take a deep breath and dig down to find the roots of your interest and passion).

Throughout my childhood, I spent a lot of time with an amazing man by the name of Ed (“Pops”) Martin. Pops was a community icon, well known for his incredible ability as a master storyteller.

When my father migrated to Bella Bella thirty-five years ago from his home in Ontario, Pops was one of his first friends in this small indigenous community. In fact, Pops took him in and adopted him, under Heiltsuk law, as his son.

In our culture and under our law, the family links you forge through traditional adoption are strong as blood ties, and weave you into a whole family. So, Pops took in my brother and I, when we came along, as his grandchildren. I grew up listening to his stories.

Pops had a rough go under the residential school system, and when he returned to Bella Bella to pick up the pieces of his life, he put away our culture and our language in a place far from his daily life. Throughout most of his adulthood, he repressed them. It wasn’t until late in his life that he let them back in, and to everyone’s amazement (and joy), his powerful grasp of our traditional language and the First Generation stories that tell our history as a people remained intact.

Woven together with his own life’s story – his experience on the land as a trapper and in the variety of occupations he adopted in his life – his recollections of family moments and the history of our community – the traditional narratives and oral historical methods that helped him to preserve a piece of our culture we nearly lost – the greater story that Ed told, piece by piece, throughout his life, was compelling and beautiful to say the very least.

I remember him admonishing me, when I asked him why he was telling me the same traditional story he’d told me the day before, that we learn by repetition and reinvention. He never told stories the exact same way, though he told them dozens and hundreds of times in his old age. Sometimes an image or a phrase or an event would migrate from one story to another. Sometimes the sequence of events would change. Sometimes the raven would transform into a loon or a deer or a wolf. Sometimes the moral would be located in a different moment, a different sentiment, a different sentence.

And sometimes, it was hard to discern where Pops’ life left off and the storytelling began. Sometimes, in his stories, he was the trickster raven. Sometimes his fishing buddies in a fond recollection of the cannery days seemed pretty similar to the figures of myth and legend. But what it taught me was that our identity as indigenous people is inextricably linked to place, and the stories associated with those places. I am the places my people come from, and I am the raven and the wolf and the deer and the First Woman. And in the end, what I amount to is just a story (I hope it’s a good one).

Maybe what appeals to me most about Mandeville is the space he creates to wear him like a garment. “He” is a fabrication. There is no Mandeville, and everyone is Mandeville. He is not rooted to just one place, one origin – he uproots, and transplants himself in a diverse range of wild and beautiful places. And in doing so – through inventing an identity that is inextricably linked with a rambling concept of nature and place – by inventing a self that is reflects a compelling impression of the exotic – by inventing a story that is many narratives, all of them invented and true even if they are not real – in doing all these things, if you read them just the right way, he teaches you how to invent yourself through storytelling.

It’s the same thing, really, that Pops used to do. In their way, they were both trickster-figures. They both blurred the boundaries between invention and recollection, roots and imagination, culture and perception. It’s not about fact or truth. It’s about how you receive the story, how you adopt it, and how you pass it on. That’s why I don’t care, frankly, who the “real” author of the Travels might be. That’s why I don’t mind that people have proven (Heavens, no!) that the narrative contains invention and plagiarism. At the end of the day, don’t you fall asleep imagining yourself traversing those incredible landscapes? Don’t you wish you could sit down across the table from Mandeville-the-imagined-figure, put down a bottle of bourbon, and start swapping stories like a couple of old soldiers – like a pair of old friends?

I miss Pops. He’s one of those people whose loss can never be reconciled. It’s been years since he passed away, but when I close my eyes, I can still see every wrinkle with perfect clarity. I can still see his twisted, arthritic hands gesturing wildly to punctuate an enthusiastic story. I can still hear every nuance of his cracking voice. I think he would have liked Mandeville. I think, next summer, that I’ll take a copy of the Travels to his mortuary pole with a bottle of bourbon and share some Mandeville stories with him. I’m not very good at compartmentalizing – I’ll probably end up weaving in some threads of Heiltsuk lore, and even some fond recollections of special moments I shared with my Pops. But that’s fitting, isn’t it?

The truth about stories, huh.

Presents to Princes (article)

Presents to Princes: A Bestiary of Strange and Wondrous Beasts, Once Known, for a Time Forgotten, and Rediscovered
By Helmut Nickel, for Metropolitan Museum Journal (1991)

For starters, how cool would it be to have a name like “Helmut Nickel”? I wonder if the department/my thesis committee would let me adopt a really amazing nom de plume for my thesis (if I ever finish the f-cking thing).

Okay, so this article is a discussion of some iconic creatures that persisted in the Middle Ages, appearing as heraldic beasts, features in bestiaries, pets of (and gifts to) people of rank, and through various other cultural conduits. The article is full of absolutely gorgeous illustrations, and I only wish I could see them in colour. I wish someone would make a picture book of medieval beasts. Maybe someone already has. Time to tackle AbeBooks…

I will keep my tongue between my clenched teeth and ignore the disparaging remarks that Nickel makes about Mandeville. Nickel discusses Mandeville briefly in terms of his “colourful account of the Great Khan’s court” (135), and the red skins that hang on the walls, from animals that Mandeville calls the “panters” (variously translated as “panthers” and “pandas”). Nickel notes a level of detail in Mandeville’s description of the skins that surpasses “the sources happily exploited by Sir John to flesh out his own stories” (135). As Nickel comments, this may be taken as an indication that “Sir John was not just a bald-faced liar but had some traveling experience of his own” (135). An unnecessary and unscholarly dig, and a pointless inclusion given that the extra details could just as easily be attributed to pure invention and imagination.

Okay, I didn’t keep quiet, so I might as well just say it: Nickel, I liked your article, but I think you should leave Mandeville alone. Human storytelling around the world is built on a rich foundation of loving plagiarism. Mandeville’s popularity attests to his incredible power as a storyteller. Don’t be jealous!

Botanical Source Areas for some Oriental Spices (article)

Botanical Source-Areas for some Oriental Spices
By Robert M. Newcomb, for Economic Botany (1963)

This article is of only tangential interest to me in my research. It contains notes on the origins of a selection of spices, some of which are present in Mandeville’s travel narrative.

Newcomb speaks to a vagueness on the origin of many spices, which he argues is intentional, mostly to protect trade interests in the East. This leads to an interesting point on how merchants contributed to the obscurity around source areas:

“Tall tales and legends were promulgated as part of the camouflaging effort. Fire-breathing monsters, great carnivorous birds, perils and hardships of the sea, as well as strange and cruel tribes were supposed to isolate and guard the spice groves. Protection from the searching newcomer was thereby assured, assuming that he were not possessed of particular charms, incantations, route maps or commercial knowledge so vital for surmounting such obstacles” (127).

So, the invention (or popularization) or marvels was, served, among other things, to protect the interests of merchants in the East. This might bear in interesting ways on Mandeville’s discussion of pepper, the beasts that beset visitors to the pepper groves, and the charms (such as lemons) that will protect people who wish to harvest.

Beyond this, Newcomb maps three botanical regions as source areas for spices in Asia: India, Malaysia and South China (128). He also makes note of sources for the following spices, some of which occur in the Travels:

Anise (131)
Betel (130)
Cardamom (130)
Cassia (130)
Cinnamon (130)
Clove (130)
Cubeb (130)
Curryleaf tree (130)
Ginger (131)
Nutmeg (130)
Pepper, black (130)
Pepper, long (130)
Turmeric (131)
Zedoary (130)

Some Fabulous Beasts (article)

Some Fabulous Beasts
By Margaret Robinson, for Folklore (1965)

In this article, Robinson examines the folkloric origins of some of the fantastical beasts that stand as examples of the medieval imagination. These origins she divides into categories:

“…we find that as far as written sources go we can divide them into roughly three categories: myths and legends, perpetuated in poetry and allegory; chronicles and travellers’ tales; and scientific works in natural history, botany and medicine” (275)

The interesting thing to my mind is that all three of these categories are present, to some extent, in Mandeville’s Travels. Because Mandeville adopts stray bits of whimsy, fact and invention from a diverse assemblage of sources, there are threads of science, history and literature woven into his narrative. You could call this troubling (it might, for example, make it hard to clearly discuss specific examples within the Mandeville text). However, I think it’s perfect. What appeals to me about the Travels is not the information they contain, per se. It’s how they speak to the imagination and storytelling impulses of the cultural moment they capture.

Some of Robinson’s passages seem to speak very clearly to author-personas like Mandeville, for example when she writes (of a specific kind of author)

“These writers are putting down what they believe to be true; what they have heard or read is true; or sometimes what they have heard or read but cannot quite believe to be true: there are of course a few exceptions who have crossed over the lines between credulity, wishful thinking, and downright fabrication” (277).

In other passages, there is no mystery, and she mentions Mandeville by name, for example as the final sample in a historical sequence of texts that speak of griffins and a certain type of giant ant:

“Mandeville’s ‘Travels’ collates all the evidence and concludes that it is in summer that the heat drives them underground, so that men can come and pick up the gold, but that in winter they are on the prowl in the daytime, so that the trick of the empty containers must be used. Mandeville puts this story in Taprobane, or Ceylon: his griffins are in Bachary, and can carry off to their nests a horse and its rider, or two oxen yoked together” (283).

Robinson also mentions both the barnacle goose (279) and the Tartary lamb (286) at different points in her article. Unfortunately, I did not find (as I’d hoped and expected) that she carried her thoughts to any interesting conclusions about what, in European culture, made a zoophytic hybrid like the barnacle goose or vegetable lamb seem plausible. But I suppose that every piece of scholarship I find that ignores this question deepens and widens a void that will make my discussion of it more compelling!

Botanical Sources of Early Medicines (article)

Botanical Sources of Early Medicines
By William S. Keezer, for Bios (1963)

This article is a discussion of some early botanists and herbalists, with examples of common toxic, medicinal and sacred herbs that concern them in their work.

Regarding plants mentioned in the Travels and other useful things:
-Keezer discusses RHUBARB and its history as a medicinal plant (185)
-He discusses Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, Ebers Papynus, and Rig-Veda as classical sources of plant information
-He discusses herbals and herbalists, including Apuleius Platonicus, Ortus Sanitatis, Herboarius Moguntinus, Tycharde Banckes, Peter Trevens, Leonard Fuch and John Parkinson
-The last of these herbalists – John Parkinson – apparently had an image of a vegetable lamb on the cover of his 1629 text Parasisi in sole, Paradisus Terrestris
-About the vegetable lamb, Keezer cites the following: [Guthrie, Douglas. A History of Medicine, J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1946].

Spices in India (article)

Spices in India
By M. Ilyas, for Economic Botany (1976)

This article is, as the title suggests, a discourse on spices in India. Ilyas details some of the typical uses of spices: [1] “a condiment and for seasoning food” (273), [2] “preservation and seasoning of meat” (273), [3] used in "medicines, cosmetics and the tobacco industry" (273), and [4] “act as stimulants, carminatives and diuretics” (273).

Ilyas includes a long description of the methods used to propagate, cultivate, harvest and prepare different varieties of pepper. Nothing about serpents and lemons, but if I need a scientific point of view to balance out Mandeville’s pepper narrative, note to self: here it is.

The Date of [Composition of] Mandeville's Travels (articles)

The Date of Mandeville’s Travels
By J. D. Thomas, for Modern Language Notes (1957)

and

The Date of Composition of Mandeville’s Travels
By Arpad Steiner, for Speculum (1934)

The Thomas piece is a brief article of fairly tangential relevance (to me). In it, Thomas presents a summary of the thoughts of critics (up until that point) on when the Travels might have been composed.

For my purposes, it is simply useful to note:
The actual date likes lies between “1355, the earliest year of authorship stated by any version” (Thomas 165) and “1371, the scribal date given in the oldest datable manuscript” (Thomas 165). Hamelius gives 1362 as the terminus a quo, with his likely date (accepted by some but by no means universally) as 1366 (Thomas 166).

The Steiner article, also brief, does not disagree with the above beyond setting the terminus a quo a bit later. It, predating Thomas by two decades and more, simply gives some historical background on different episodes in the Travels that can assist in the dating. Says Steiner, “the date of composition of Mandeville’s Travels may easily have been 1366” (Steiner 147), but certainly “the Travels were composed between 1365 and the early part of 1371” (Steiner 147).

Well: should anyone ask me when the Travels was written, I now have something to cover my ass.

Travels with Margery (chapter)

Travels with Margery: pilgrimage in context
By Rosalynn Voaden, a chapter in Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

Voaden’s chapter is concerned with Margery Kempe and the literary experience of pilgrimage from a feminine point of view. For Margery, claims Voaden, “Her restless nature resisted both spiritual and geographical boundaries, and she was prepared to face risk and hardship to respond to ‘the allure of the beyond’” (177).

Voaden (through Victor and Edith Turner) constructs pilgrimage as “a liminal period, when the participants are removed from their accustomed physical and social states and where a new kind of communitas, a ‘social antistructure’, can develop” (181).

For Margery, this is possible because her travels revolve around her partners en route and her interactions with them. Though Mandeville, at different points, mentions intermittent travel partners, his narrative is never mitigated by their actions, thoughts or characters. The Book of Margery Kempe relies on travel partners to help Margery enact the scenarios and pseudo-martyrdom that construct her character as that of a self-styled saint. Without their presence and actions, she could not act out the humiliation and suffering that allow her to feel she is imitating Christ.

Arguably, though, one might claim that Mandeville’s communitas is broader and more abstract – his predecessors and contemporaries in the genre of medieval travel writers, and his relationship to the culture and audience that received his book so favourably.

Voaden’s description of the organization and content of Margery’s text and of her reasons for traveling open a useful space for comparison with Mandeville. As Voaden points out, Margery includes no extraneous details in her narrative; all her text is devoted to bland, standard descriptions of well-known pilgrimage sites and Biblical places, and indications of her personal and deeply emotional (read: irrational and histrionic) reactions to those places. “This pattern continues throughout all her pilgrimages, and has caused some critics to wonder if she even went to these places, so marked is her lack of interest in her physical whereabouts” (185). Mandeville, conversely, is so invested in place that his encyclopaedic depth of interest and description is apparently too well-researched to be plausible. Go figure.

Anyway, an important distinction must be drawn between curiosity (curiositas), wisdom (sapientia) and knowledge (scientia) in medieval thought. For a strictly Christian traveler, curiosity is not a valid reason to travel. In fact, to some, “it was categorised as a vice. Indulgence in curiositas, it was believed, was morally dangerous, excited the senses and signified an unstable attitude of mind” (185). A devout pilgrim traveled in search of wisdom and knowledge, and for Margery, that means bare, literal descriptions of place that will not interfere with her response to what they represent – signals of Christ’s suffering, and the path to salvation. Mandeville, on the other hand, is a much more secular traveler. While he does have a religious bent, he also states explicitly at two distinct places and implicitly through the drive of his narrative that his intent in writing is to indulge the appetite of his audience for marvels and exotic things. He strikes a balance between morals and marvels, of course, but his taste for the fantastic means no man could happily call him a compass of proper devotion.

Voaden speaks thus of Margery’s experience of travel: “Just as a telescope brings distant objects into focus so that they become part of the immediate environment and enrich one’s perception of the world, so, for Margery Kempe, pilgrimage and travel for spiritual ends brought into her world distant lives and different devotional practices, diverse forms of spirituality and new ways to suffer for Christ. Travel therefore provided the lens through which she came to understand herself and her life, and consequently was of paramount importance in shaping her presentation of herself in her text as a visionary and holy woman” (191). Travel, I think, means something entirely different to Mandeville, who constructs himself as nothing more than a gout-ridden wanderer with a penchant for gripping tales and the spark of the fantastical.

But then again: Saint John of the Vegetable Lamb? Patron saint of storytellers, drifters, and hybrid half-nothings? That has a much better ring to it than Saint Margery…

Provincializing Medieval Europe (article)

Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville's Cosmopolitan Utopia
By Karma Lochrie, for PMLA (2009)

I've always liked Karma Lochrie.

This article is not of outstanding relevance to me, but it does make some interesting points that bear mentioning:

Lochrie suggests that the Travels are a work of cosmopolitan utopianism (rather than the typical insular utopianism) that performs the act of "provincializing Christian Europe" (594).

For Lochrie, "By pursuing middleness in his travels . . . Mandeville succeeds in provincializing Western Christianity and European culture" (595). And "Mandeville's twinning of Aristotle's ethical principle of middleness with a geography of middleness establishes the utopian function of his text: to seek out middleness in his travels by way of uncovering an ethical principle for encountering the world" (594). For Mandeville, "The provincializing of the Latin Christian West . . . is an intermittent and cumulative project made up of his geographic imaginary and ethnographic encounters" (594).

Lochrie also makes an interesting point on the space for marvels in the Travels: "Discourse of the marvelous depends on a center-periphery epistemology that, in turn, depends on a series of binary oppositions of natural/unnatural, knowledge/ignorance, and rational/irrational. This epistemology is undone through the 'en-marvelling' of Mandeville - that is, through the reversal of the marveling gaze and an expanding of the field of the marvelous" (597). As Lochrie points out, Mandeville seems to share Jaques de Vitry's thoughts on the tolerance of differences - after all, "the one-eyes Cyclopes view all two-eyed creatures as marvels" (597), right?

The diversity of mankind (chapter)

The diversity of mankind in The Book of John Mandeville
By Suzanne Conklin Akbari, a chapter in Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

As with many of the articles I've read recently, this is only peripherally related to my interest in Mandeville, and then only in terms of Akbari's general observations about the Travels.

Still, I am glad to find one more person who lays this as the foundation of their work: what makes Mandeville important "is not the validity of the traveller's observations, but rather his readers' enthusiastic reception of this portrait of the world" (156). I am not super interested in the made-for-BBC mystery of Mandeville's true identity, or the scholarly catfight of trashing him as a plagiarist. Like Akbari, I'm interested in the text, and its "extraordinary popularity, which persisted well into the seventeenth century, illustrat[ing] the power of the text to capture the imagination and to intersect with a range of cultural currents: exploration, nationalism and even affective piety" (156).

Akbari is primarily interested in monsters, racial diversity and the use of Macrobius' concept of climatic zones to understand the appearance and character of different races in the medieval period.



In this system of thought, people located in the "frigid" zones (extreme upper and lower, yellow in this illustration) are large and healthy, though frigid and unable to conceive children easily; they are light-skinned, light-haired and their bodies reflect the bright, clear climate. People in the "torrid" zone (in the center of this illustration, represented in red) are black in colour and tend to be phlegmatic, with soft bodies and impaired digestion. They become intoxicated easily, and also conceive (and miscarry) easily. The heat and humidity make them sluggish and lazy. People in the "temperate" zones (the blue in this illustration) represent a balance of the elements in each extreme: heat and cold, moisture and dryness, and correspondingly, health and character.

Though this bears on some non-botanical aspects of Mandeville (he assesses some of the people he encounters according to this system) I don't find it particularly useful for my research. I just included it because I think it's cool, and because I wonder what medieval people would have made of us brown-skinned natives of questionable character at the east/west extreme of their virtuous "temperate zones".

In addition to the balancing of climates, "The wonders of the world are balanced as well: Mandeville describes an amazing fruit, found in farthest India. It looks like a melon, but when ripe, it opens to reveal a little lamb inside, so that people eat 'bothe the frut and the best'. But this marvel, far from being an anomaly uniquely found in the exotic Orient, is simply an example of the balanced diversity of nature: Mandeville tells his eastern guides about the barnacle geese, animals that grow on trees in the British Isles . . . Wonders are found at each end of the climatic extremes, balances in accord and harmony" (161).

Another general discussion by Akbari is of some interest to me: the distinction between mirabilia and miracula. This distinction is made elsewhere, of course, but since it's made here...I might as well write about it now. Says Akbari, "The medieval understanding of monstrosity is further illuminated by the distinction between 'mirabilia', things which cause wonder simply because they are not understood, and 'miracula', things which are actually contrary to or beyond nature" (167). And, "This . . . disctinction is crucial to The Book of John Mandeville, where the presence of a variety of monstrous races and marvellous phenomena generates in the narrator (and in the reader) a naive sense of wonder. That sense of wonder is widened by the discovery that a rule which should normally hold true appears to be violated in nature. Such discoveries extend beyond the experience of observing the monstrous races; they occur, for example, when the animal or plant life of a given location does not correspond to what that territory ought to produce, according to the predictions of the natural philosophers" (167).

Distinguishing between different categories of wonderment is always important in life and literature, huh? I'd rather be accurate than emphatic. The real encounter with the Other (and the experience of being received as Other in another culture) is a strange experience in its own right. And the incredible things one can experience beyond the bounds of what is known? Are marvelous, if you experience them right. No need to fabricate - just to pitch the perfect balance needed to communicate to people who can only experience vicariously through your words the sense of wonder and beauty captured in a moment, and in a place.

I'm pretending to be philosophical because dinner is ready (for once I didn't have to cook) and I don't have anything critical to say about this text. I'm not gonna lie, I like Akbari, but I'm past the point of being able to feign cogency and academic rigour. I'll try again later.

Craft and Idolatry (chapter)

Craft and Idolatry: “Sotylle” Devices in Mandeville’s Travels
By Scott Lightsey, from Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (2007)

Lightsey’s interest in this chapter lies in the man-made mechanical marvels present in the Travels, namely the two golden birds in the episodes with the Old Man of the Mountain and in the court of the Great Chan of Cathay. Although I am not so interested in ornithology or machines, I think the arguments made by Lightsey here still speak broadly to the concept and understanding of nature and man’s relationship to it. Also, I share some of his sentiments about Mandeville’s authority and authenticity.

As Lightsey opens his chapter, he refers to SJM’s “spotty critical history with regard to his reputation for truth-telling” (137), but points out that “in the fourteenth century, his reputation for cataloguing the marvels and wonders of the east was unparalleled, and in both England and France his Travels was considered a worthy book of natural science and an unparalleled register of mirabilia” (136).

(Side note: I’ve noticed an astonishing number of scholars that don’t seem to care a whit about how repetitive they are. Really? You couldn’t think of any other adjective than “unparalleled”, and you absolutely had to use it twice in one sentence? Don’t tell me it’s stylistic, or for emphasis. You’re being lazy. Everything we do is art – don’t forget it.)

Lightsey continues, “Despite Mandeville’s dubious reputation among modern scholars, who find in his judicious compilation of source material a confabulated east never visited by the narrator, the popularity of his story was such that it proliferated in less than two decades into most major European languages, eclipsing the tales of Marco Polo and eventually finding its way, by the end of the Middle Ages, into the hands of Christopher Columbus. The text’s marvels are so choice, its descriptions so rich, that its pastiche rang more true than Rusticello’s story of the Polos’ actual voyages” (138).

But the marvels it contains are not mere embellishment. “These marvels are far more than static objects or window-dressing for the narrator’s fantastic journey; they are thematically integral to the structure and moral concerns underlying Mandeville’s work” (139).

The style of the writing points to one of its cleverest functions: “The author employs a first-person narrator to describe the wonders of his eastward journey, synthesizing varied source material into a seamless narrative apparently depicting personal experience. This style is calculated to invite reader participation in Mandeville’s journey of discovery” (140). However, while Lightsey intimates that readers are invited to participate primarily in a journey toward and through “Christian salvation history” (140), I don’t totally buy it. I think the comrades-in-the-journey tone calculated here speaks to a different moment in European history, when travel had become a more secularized experience and travel writers were expected to answer a taste for the simple exotic.

However, I agree with Lightsey’s argument that marvels in the Travels are “the token, the symbol, or term of exchange” (140) in the separation of east and west. And “What Mandeville’s journey offers, through his reports and observations of mirabilia, is a comparative look at the state of the author’s world” (140). It is through Mandeville that we can ably realize that “Marvels rehearsed in travel narratives and wonder-books were the intellectual currency of medieval European interest in the east . . . [and] contributed to the European taste for the exotic” (140). For the Travels in particular, “The exotic characters and geographies that so often draw critical attention . . . reflect the ways western audiences perceived the notion of travel or encounters with the unknown; in fact, it is through his mirabilia that one may find interesting avenues of access to medieval ways of thinking” (140).

In short, in reading the Travels, we receive not only a geography of marvels that maps the east, but also a “social geography” (142) that gives us incredible insight into the cultural imagination of the historical moment in which the text was popularized.

Interestingly, Lightsey also argues that “Mandeville’s wonder-filled journey eastward becomes a figural return to an earlier place and time, where European Christian values could be imagined preserved among the mirabilia of far lands. The terrestrial garden lying at the end of the journey signals hope for reform at home, and his portrayal of the false garden highlights the contrast between western life and eastern spirituality” (142-3).

I am going to skip over Lightsey’s extensive discussion of the mechanical birds in the Great Chan’s court, and look at some of his points around the “false paradise” Mandeville encounters. Lightsey’s purpose in looking at this false garden is mainly in examining the manmade marvels within it, but he does speak a bit to what it represents on a larger scale.

“Unlike the terrestrial garden formed by God to nurture prelapsarian humanity, this garden is an artificial paradise, contrived by the Old Man to pervert the wills of men to his murderous ends” (152). Within the Travels, this false paradise is also “the symbolic moral opposite of Prester John’s land” (152). Lightsey draws our attention to the “narratorial distance” (153) employed by Mandeville in this section, who foregoes his professed interest in strange wonders to give a quite perfunctory summary of the marvels in the false garden. Here, he lacks the curiosity displayed in the Chan’s court – whereas, there, he had an interest in understanding the means by which the marvels were created, in the false paradise the inherent evil of the artifice (designed not to titillate but manipulate) he shows no such inclination to examine and understand.

Lightsey makes two other brief points toward his conclusion that interest me:

-First, regarding the apple of Justinian in the statue at Constantinople: “This image [of the fallen apple] is understood as a token of Justinian’s, and by extension Christianity’s, loss of dominion over the territories of the earth” (156), but “the apple is also a dual symbol: its shape betokens the ‘world that is round’ about which Mandeville is concerned, and the apple is a symbolic reference to the Fall and the postlapsarian condition of mankind” (156). I like Lightsey’s reference to Justinian as “a sort of medieval Ozymandias” (156).

-Second, in reference to the small story about Seth traveling to paradise (near the narrative point where Mandeville is discussing the True Cross), Lightsey draws a parallel between Seth and Mandeville. Both seek terrestrial paradise – both are denied. And in their narratives, we find dual themes of loss and redemption.

Pliny and Roman Botany (article)

Pliny and Roman Botany
By Jerry Stannard, for Isis (1965)

First of all, can I just say that the practice of scholars embedding childish digs at their peers within published articles is clearly just part of the rich continuum that has culminated in whining, vicious teenage blogging?

This article seems to be one aspect of Stannard’s quest to rehabilitate the good name of Pliny: “. . . if Theophrastus was the Father of Botany, to Pliny belongs the honorific Father of the History of Botany” (423). Stannard admits Pliny’s errors: “He was gullible and uncritical, he lacked great originality, and he was not possessed of sufficient training always to understand the details of the scientific and technical problems he discussed” (420). However, he states that “. . . a study of the botanical portions of his writings, long overdue, will reveal not only that Pliny is an invaluable source for tracing the development of early botany, but also that he made important contributions of his own” (420).

In sum:
-Pliny makes liberal use of other sources of information, at times inheriting their errors, and at other times embellishing them with important details for which history has not credited him
-The personal, eyewitness investigations and observations he includes in his accounts point to a rigour and credibility not necessarily shared with his armchair-botanist compatriots
-His accounts include the first literary mentions of a number of plants, the prototypical modern physic garden, lost works hitherto unknown to the field, and a wealth of information on contemporary practices that are rarely recorded by others but provide important context for the study of botany
-Stannard also points to Pliny’s influence on modern botanical vocabulary through his place at the root of the encyclopaedic tradition

I’m not going to go very far with this article, because it’s only tangentially related at best. For my purposes, it’s simply weight behind the claim that Pliny was, in the time the Travels were composed, a botanical authority whose works were well-known throughout Europe and who may arguably have influenced both Mandeville’s text and the botanical imagination of the culture that received it.

Of smelly seas and ashen apples (chapter)

Of smelly seas and ashen apples: two German pilgrims’ view of the East
By Anne Simon, a chapter from Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

In this chapter, Simon follows two German travelers – Ludolf von Suchem (1350) and Hans Tucher (roughly 150 years later) through their pilgrimages to the east. As the chapter title indicates, both pilgrims write of the ashen apple that appears in Mandeville.

Says LvS, “. . . all the country round about is full of trees and great fruits, exceeding fair to see; but when these fruits are plucked and broken open, they are full of dust and ashes within, and for three days the hands of him who plucked them cannot be rid of a vile stench; for even all the country round about it is full of God’s curse” (196).

He’s writing of the land around the Dead See, of which HT writes similarly: “The stench by the Dead Sea is vile, yet many pretty trees are to be found there which bear fruit that is large, attractive and appealing, just like nice apples. However, when you pick them, on the inside these fruit are full of dust and emit an evil smell” (196).

Of course, the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah bordered the Dead Sea, and “Both authors explicitly connect the overwhelming stench of the Dead Sea and its inability to support life to the evil practiced in these cities” (196).

Simon offers the following interpretation of the moralized nature presented to us by LvS, HT and Mandeville, among others: “Apples recall Original Sin and the Fall of Man, or which the vice that led ultimately to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was but one manifestation. Given their deceptive appeal, they may also symbolise the vanity of all earthly appearances, especially in comparison with the eternal truths to which pilgrimage bear witness” (196).

What does Mandeville have to say on the matter? Quoting from the Penguin modern:

“By the side of this sea grow trees that bear apples of fine colour and delightful to look at; but when they are broken or cut, only ashes and dust and cinders are found inside, as a token of the vengeance that God took on those five cities and the countryside roundabout, burning them with the fires of Hell” (90).

Like other travelers, he includes this piece of information – whether as a means of moralizing, as a simple observation, or more likely because it had already become a standard feature in travel narratives mentioning the Dead Sea to which M. was compelled to conform. In any event, he is clear and vehement in his connection of the phenomenon to the fires of Hell. It is an interest token of moral nature that is of clear importance to European travelers. It does not concern Simon (her article is not actually about Sodom apples) but I am also interested in the real plant that medieval travelers likely understood to be an “apple of ash”, and on the prevailing use of the Sodom apple as a symbol in modern queer literature. If connecting Mandeville with Colm Toibin isn’t bizarre, I don’t know what is.

What Simon does is take us briefly through the travel narratives composed by each of these German travelers. This provides lots of interesting insight into the idea of travel writing and pilgrimage, the conception of audience, and the impetus for writing and communicating the experience of travel.

In no particular order:

-Simon mentions at a certain point, in relation to LvS, that he intentionally omitted details about things in exotic places that were commonplace there. That is, even if they are unknown to home audiences, the quality of being commonplace in their indigenous contexts struck down the worthiness of these objects in LvS’s narrative. So, in Famagusta, LvS states “I say nothing about spices, for they are as common there as bread is here” (200). I think that Mandeville is not so discerning, but it is interesting to reflect on the extent to which the personal qualities and prejudices of the author limit or mitigate the information received by the audience.

-Of the distinctly religious discourse in pilgrimage narratives from the Holy Land: “. . . missing from this and indeed many other pilgrimage reports is any explicit expression of personal piety or jubilation on finally seeing the places of Christ’s ministry so familiar from the Bible” (202). I think this is true of Mandeville and many other authors, any might be attributed to a desire to make it simple for the audience to experience the travel vicariously without feeling inhibited by the author’s own specific personal, emotional or spiritual investment. But I guess it depends on your purpose in writing. When I think back (with a small shudder) on Margery Kempe, I seem to remember nothing BUT passionate weeping at the firsthand experience of Biblical places. Then again, she was basically a self-styled saint who probably expected her readers to want to mimic and assume HER experience just as she mimicked and assumed that of Christ.

-Simon mentions LvS’s relative tolerance toward people of other religions (204). This is largely true of Mandeville but not, apparently, universally amongst medieval travel writers. (Is anything ever universally true?)

-LvS writes of the Bedouins in almost the exact same language as Mandeville. (Shit, is he a source used by Mandeville and I’m just forgetting? That would be embarrassing. Jessie: “Wow, these are super similar!” Committee: “Well, Jessie, that’s because ONE IS PLAGIARISING THE OTHER.”) Anyway, the point is made that they are swarthy, uncouth nomads who neither sow nor reap, and are therefore EVIL. (TruFacts: The proper term for this is “Disney Logic”. Or should be, anyway.) Says Simon, “Even if the characteristics singled out for description reflect the facts, swarthiness and ugliness are signs of the diabolic with which the genuinely strange and threatening are associated. Bedouins live outside regulated urban communities, dress differently, and enjoy a way of life that must have been completely incomprehensible to pilgrims” (205). I’d like to take this one step further and look at how their values regarding and interactions with the natural world are also read as an indication of their spiritual state.

-LvS apparently mentions barnacle geese in his narrative, at least according to Simon, and perhaps the vegetable lamb as well (though I’d think she’d have mentioned). But Simon has a fairly pithy summary of why the fantastical cannot be dismissed, even if we don’t find it plausible: “The for-us-unlikely is not questioned, possibly because in God’s Creation, everything is possible. The Bible itself bears witness to the existence of giants (Genesis 6:4); fantastic creatures were documented in classical and oriental travel literature and depicted on the margins of medieval mappaemundi. Besides this, the exotic was essential to the poetics of the Other, especially of the Orient” (206).

-On the practice of incorporating existing material into personal travel writing, Simon upholds Hans Tucher as evidence that it is not an unusual method – he had a particular “skill in integrating into the narrative material from other sources, including legendaries, chronicles, mythology, other pilgrimage reports, oral traditions and information passed on by monks, guides and local inhabitants” (209). Further, his sources are not acknowledged. So why does Mandeville get such a bad rap for doing the same, huh? Huh? Okay, there’s probably a good reason why that I’m just too tired to think of.

So, in sum: a useful commentary on some of the conventions of medieval travel writing with examples from outside of England/France that still show important commonalities with the texts I stare at balefully every day.

The Story of Pinna and the Syrian Lamb (article)

The Story of Pinna and the Syrian Lamb
By Berthold Laufer, for The Journal of American Folklore (1915)

Every time I read an article by Berthold Laufer, I feel like I've been schooled.

Anyway:
Laufer's article begins with an assessment of the legends concerning pinna, named in some Chinese myths (in the Later Han Dynasty, for example, AD 25-220) as "water-sheep" (103). The pinna is a type of mollusc, rooted to a particular spot on the sea bed by threadlike filaments called byssi. The molluscs were a source of pearls and meat, and the byssi were spun into a fine golden cloth of surpassing beauty.

The pinna's importance is well-documented, and its function in the production of textiles has Hellenistic roots.

Aristotle mentions the pinna in a discourse on the hierarchy of the living world: though he places plants below animals in the spectrum of living things, within the realm of plants there is a hierarchy too. Some plants are closer than others to the rank of animals - particularly those living in the sea which exhibit animal characteristics (106). To show the occasional difficulty in discerning between plant and animal, Aristotle points to the pinna: "devoid of motion, [the pinna] is rooted like a plant to a fixed spot, and must perish when detached from its intrenchment." Tricky thing: it exhibits both plant and animal characteristics.

The pinna has a strong presence in early literature, mentioned by Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny, Aelian and others. It also has a strong presence in Chinese and Arabic legends. For Laufer, the transformation in legend to a terrestrial vegetable lamb simply "represents a metamorphosis of the biological condition of the" pinna" (117). His foundation for discussing the terrestrial vegetable lamb is sound, and bears repeating:

"I propose to examine this curious legend without any bias toward speculations which have previously been advanced" (116). And, "The student of folk-lore and the trained observer will be conscious of two points, - first that the germ of a fact or observation relative to natural history underlies the legend; and, second, that, as not all its constituents can satisfactorily be explained from natural events, it must have been construed with a certain end in view, which may have an allegorical purport or religious cause" (116).

Religious cause, hoo boy, just wait until he kicks off his discussion of some Talmudic texts and Syrian Christian symbolism. Anyway! Before we get there...

Now, Laufer first does a neat little pirouette and discusses the wide range of Chinese and other texts that discuss the vegetable lamb. Beyond the early legend of the water-sheep (pinna), and serving as a "continuation or further development of it" (115), we have a tradition in the Annals of the T'ang Dynasty (618-906). Here, "There are lambs engendered in the soil. The inhabitants wait till they are going to sprout, and then build enclosures around as a preventative measure for wild beasts that might rush in from outside to devour them" (115). These lambs are attached to the ground by an umbilical cord which, if forcibly severed, will kill the lamb. However, if the lambs separate themselves naturally from their "stalk", they become free animals. But it's key that the separation is instigated by the lamb itself.

Thus, when the men are ready for the lambs to be separated, in some versions of the legend they storm the pens on horseback bearing swords and shouting to frighten the lambs into severing their umbilical cords in order to flee. And interestingly, some Arabic stories around the marine sheep - the pinna - have a neat parallel. They claim that a crustacean predates the pinna, frightening the mollusk into "dropping" its byssi (threads). The crustacean consumes the mollusk, and the threads drift ashore, where they are collected by people and woven into textiles. In this Arabic tradition, the horsemen and the crustaceans, bearing their swords and pincers, serve much the same function.

Through this sort of metamorphoses of legends from sea-lamb to terrestrial zoophyte, Laufer also connects the pinna and the land-based vegetable lamb to a figure found in the Talmud that takes the form of a man that is connected to the ground by a stalk and stem. Where he takes it next breaks my brain:

The Talmudic text (the Mishna Kilaim, VIII, 5) refers to adne sadeh (translated by Laufer as "lords of the field"). In a commentary on this passage, Rabbi Simeon (d. 1235) claims this creature is "the man of the mountain", which "draws its food out of the soil by means of the umbilical cord: if its navel be cut, it cannot live" (120). Further, one Rabbi Meir claims there is an animal that "issues from the earth like the stem of a plant, just as a gourd. In all respects . . . [it] has a human form" (120), and "As far as the stem (or umbilical cord) stretches, it devours the herbage all around. Whoever is intent on capturing this animal must not approach it, but tear at the cord until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal soon dies" (120).

How do we interpret this? Says Laufer, speaking of symbolism in the Syrian Christian tradition, this Talmudic "man of the mountain" figure "unquestionably represents an illusion to the 'Divine Lamb standing on Mount Sion'" (121). However, "It is inconceivable that Christ should have been conceived as a lamb immovably rooting in the soil" (121).

Rather, ". . . it was the faithful who were thus depicted, either as the retinue of the Good Pastor, or enjoying the delights of Paradise after their Salvation. Essentially, the "lambs" are devotees, and the "umbilical cord" represents their attachment to earthly pleasures. The "lambs" are threatened by "beasts" (temptations) and can be protected by a "shepherd" (Christ) only to a point: they must ultimately save themselves by cutting the tether of their own umbilical cord (an act that cannot be performed on their behalf without killing them, as we see in the vegetable lamb/pinna legend). The "mounted horsemen" that frighten the "lambs" into freeing themselves actually represent the Last Judgment, and the severance of the "umbilical cord" frees them for redemption into Heaven.

Heavy shit.

However, as Laufer points out, the spiritual drift of the sacred Syrian allegory had long sunk into oblivion" (125) by the time Odoric and Mandeville were writing about the vegetable lamb. As both medieval travelers locate their vegetable lambs in Asia and offer a "worthy counterpart" (125) to the contemporaneous Chinese version, Laufer draws a connection between the two that has Odoric and Mandeville merely modifying an existing Oriental legend.

Interestingly, Laufer is quite vehement in his disgracing of Henry Lee (author of The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: a Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant). The main points of his attack are (1) the fact that cotton production was well-known in Asia and Europe and an unlikely thing for people to widely mistake, and (2) his assessment takes into account only European legends and not the wealth of Asian ones. Still, he credits Lee with undoing the fable that the source of the vegetable lamb legend is in the manipulated rhizomes of a fern tree.

All in all, a long, frighteningly rigorous article. To read Laufer with Lee is to get a more balanced idea of how the legend grew in Asia and Europe respectively, and how the legends were received, modified and embellished as cultural objects. I'll write about Lee's booklet soon.

Engelbert Kaempfer and the Myth of the Scythian Lamb (article)

Engelbert Kaempfer and the Myth of the Scythian Lamb
By Robert W. Carrubba, for The Classical World (1993)

This article opens with a substantial (for an article) biography of Engelbert Kaempfer, a German scholar and physician whose travels (1683-93) gave him the opportunity to personally research and report on the origin of the vegetable lamb myth.

Carrubba points to Kaempfer's extensive training, his firm grounding in both Humanities and Sciences, his belief in "the primacy of reason and scientific methodology" (41) and other qualities that make him a reliable reporter on the V.L. In addition, he seems to have composed works on Persian and Japanese botany.

Carrubba includes a nice, concise summary of the lamb myth, which I'll include here in case I need to write one some day and find it's more prudent to copy and credit:

"In common form, the myth has it that the Scythian Lamb is a zoophyte (plant-animal or vegetable lamb) which grows from the ground on a stem attached to its navel. In all other respects the creature looks like a real lamb of flesh and blood with four legs and a sizeable tail. The Lamb of Scythia or Tartary feeds on the grass about it and is a prey for wolves, though not for other carnivores." (43)

In discussing Kaempfer's report on the vegetable lamb, Carrubba first summarizes its organization:

"Kaempfer's report o nthe Scythian Lamb is organized as follows: (1) credulity and misunderstanding of terms created the fable; (2) the conventional description of the creature; (3) etymology of the word Borometz (Borametz); (4) description of a real breed of Scythian Lamb; (5) extraction of the lamb fetus; (6) preparation of the skins; (7) debunking of the myth, based on eyewitness investigation; (8) ascription of the origin of the myth to ignorance, inattentiveness, and the human inclination to believe in wonders." (44)

I won't get too far into Carrubba's rehashing of Kaempfer's arguments. Why? Because a couple of centuries after Kaempfer and before Carrubba, Henry Lee sat down and penned a great little booklet that explains everything in great detail, from the possible roots of the myth through all the major attempts to explain and understand it. The men and their peers ultimately reached different conclusions -

(1) that the origin was based in folk art made from manipulated fern tree rhizomes,
(2) that it was rooted in a misunderstanding/mistranslation of cotton, and
(3) that it could be traced to the practice of removing fetal lambs from the womb for their soft skins, resulting in misleading "scientific specimens"

What is perhaps most reassuring about Kaempfer is the fact that his report is based on eyewitness investigation. That lends him a credibility that is lacking in some other folks who discuss the zoophytic phenomenon.

As usual, no direct bearing on Mandeville, but the article points to the place the vegetable lamb had in the collective imagination of medieval and early modern Europe, and the whole spectrum of response (from Erasmus Darwin's airy-fairy poems to Kaempfer's rigorous scientific report) to an idea that Mandeville helped to solidify within the culture of the period.

Medieval Landscape and the Encyclopedic Tradition (article)

Medieval Landscape and the Encyclopedic Tradition
By Walter Cahn, for Yale French Studies (1991)

This article is most irrelevant (though well-written). So I'm just going to include some quotes I found interesting.

"Scholars who from the nineteenth century onward sought to chart the history of a concern with landscape in art and literature were struck first and foremost by the silence of the Middle Ages on this score, by absence, in other words, or at any rate, by the apparent lack of a concrete expression in the medieval period of anything resembling a conception of the natural world in our sense of the term" (11).

I see.

"...when medieval artists turned to nature, their vision was transfixed by 'the icy winds of doctrine,' and flowers and trees lost their lively quality to become prototypes of the divine" (12).

I realize Cahn is speaking of art and not literature, but I think this bears in interesting ways on Mandeville's treatment of nature. Sometimes, he is concerned largely (or at least clearly) with the imprint of the divine, and only rarely does he mention nature for its own sake, but where he shines is in a middle ground in which nature is important for the way it reflects culture.

"...much encyclopedic writing about the natural world is mere enumeration and description, leavened by etymological word play, and conceived as an inventory of the Lord's creation, a more or less systematic supplement to the record of the divine work given in the opening verses of Genesis" (14).

See above. Then, Cahn goes on to discuss Marvels of the East, and the illustrations within (focusing on an illustration of a balm tree). He draws attention to the way the illustration evokes the innate qualities of the plant, and the importance of space in the composition.

Later in the article:

"...the rendering of nature in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages is often made by way of personifications, not only of winds, but of other entities like rivers, the earth and natura herself(17).

Which just leads me to think generally about figurative nature and the use of plants as anything (and everything) other than specific objects/scientific specimens in the Travels.

Medicines and Spices (article)

Medicines and Spices, with Special Reference to Medieval Monastic Accounts
By Marjorie Jenkins, for Garden History (1976)

This article is very short but has a couple of interesting points. It is essentially a note on the importance and prevalence of spices in medieval monastic records. Marjorie Jenkins (based on notes from Nancy Jenkins) lists some common medieval spices in Europe, with reference to the Rule of St. Benedict. Then, she notes some evidence for the cultural importance of spices.

Interestingly, she points out the taxes that were levied on spices in the 1300s in order to raise funds for things like repairing London Bridge. That spices, along with known commodities of import, were subject to taxes points to their popularity and their increasingly consistent place in the medieval kitchen and apothecary.

Jenkins also points to the use of spices as a currency for things like the payment of rent: with standardized prices (which, per pound, could be easily converted to "sheep" or money) making them an acceptable form of payment. Lastly, she points to the place of spices in gifts and tribute to royalty and persons of import.

Brief though this article may be, it points to the use of monastic records as an indication of trafficking in spices in Europe - purchases by the Cellarer and Infirmarer reflect the popularity and trade of different spices/botanic commodities in the kitchen and infirmary.

What these accounts do not satisfactorily reflect is the cultivation and use of indigenous herbs in monastic gardens: says Jenkins, medicinal plants which are indigenous or easily cultivated in our climate are not mentioned in these accounts (48), and I suppose one (I) must look elsewhere for information on the popularity and use of indigenous plants.

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (article)

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Alice F. Tryon, American Fern Journal, Vol. 47 / No. 1, 1957).

Tryon's article begins by tracing the image of the vegetable lamb through some of its most notable appearances in literature. She begins with Rabbi Jochanan in 436, moves through its medieval manifestations in a 1235 work by a "commentator" on the Scriptures - John Mandeville ("something of an English Ulysses") - Friar Odoric - and then, Claude Duret, in his Histoire Admirable des Plantes. She then briefly mentions its reception in 16th and 17th century academic circles, citing Kircher of Avignon and Girolamo Cardana of Pavia as her examples. Tryon documents Dutch East India Company surgeon Dr. Kaempfer's attempts to find the creature, and then Sir Hans Sloane's success (he "laid the object before the scientific world" as he presented a specimen to the Royal Society of London).

The remainder of the article, appropriately enough for the American Fern Journal, decidedly states that the specimen provided by Sloane was actually "a portion of a fern plant that grows in southern China" (Cibotium barometz). Essentially, the ferns, which are actually a type of fern tree reaching 15 feet in height, bear clusters of fronds with trunks that are covered in long "hairs". A portion of the trunk is cut and the fronds cut to resemble appendages; the addition of seeds to represent eyes produces a piece of animalistic folk-art that much resembles a lamb (or other small animal). As I mentioned in my brief summary of the equally brief Tree-Wool article, this is one of two prevalent explanations for the origin of the vegetable lamb myth, the other being a simple conflation of "trees" and "lambs" in a misunderstanding of then-exotic cotton.

Tryon also includes the pretty bit of verse by Erasmus Darwin which I've mentioned in other entries, and I'll include it here because it's quite nice:

Cradled in snow, and fanned by Arctic air,
Shines, gentle Barometz, thy golden hair;
Rooted in earth, each cloven hoof descends,
And round and round her flexile neck she bends,
Crops the gray coral moss and hoary thyme,
Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime;
Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam,
And seems to bleat - a 'vegetable lamb'.

(Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden)

Originals and Analogues (article)

Originals and Analogues of the Exeter Book Riddles
By Frederick Tupper Jr., for Modern Language Notes (1903)

Just a quick note:
This article discusses the Exeter Book Riddles, including all sorts of weird and wonderful information. One of the answers proposed for a certain riddle is our very own... “Barnacle Goose”!

This riddle “opens the gates to a world of strange beliefs and superstitious fancies” (100). Just how I like my riddles. Tupper notes the earliest literary account of the barnacle goose – Giraldus Cambrensis, in his twelfth century work Topographia Hiberniae.

This indicates, if nothing else, the small niche occupied by zoophytic hybrids in the English imagination, starting before the twelfth century and expanding into the early modern era. Why? Couldn’t tell you. But here’s yet another piece of evidence that this odd fascination exists.

Chaucer and Mandeville's Travels (article)

Chaucer and Mandeville’s Travels
By Josephine Waters Bennett, for Modern Language Notes (1953)

This article attempts to make links between Chaucer and Mandeville, and speaks in tentative tones that are later assured by Moseley’s article, I suppose (discussed in the previous post).

Essentially, Bennett argues for a borrowing from the Travels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. This is on the basis that (1) Chaucer’s “as tellen knyghtes olde” could be construed as a reference to Sir John Mandeville, the only popular author writing of the east who happened to be a knight, (2) the likely date for the writing of the Travels would have made the author a contemporary of Chaucer’s grandfather, therefore fitting the descriptor “olde” in the above-quoted line, (3) the wittiness of Mandeville in certain points of the Travels is akin to Chaucer’s, likely making the latter more disposed to think well enough of the former to borrow his work, and (4) the immense popularity of the Travels makes it a worthy cultural reference to make for Chaucer’s audience’s benefit.

However, as Moseley made clear in his article, at the time Chaucer was writing, the Travels was not yet popular in England. Would the merit of popularity on the continent make it a worthy cultural reference? Perhaps.

In any event, nothing to do with plants.

Some Notable Life-Histories in Zoological Folklore (article)

Some Notable Life-Histories in Zoological Folklore (Frank G. Speck and John Witthoft, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 60 / No. 238, 1947).

I seem to be attacking a lot of old articles lately. I actually like them better than modern scholarship. There seems to be less preening, and less attention paid to the cutthroat attempts to overcite experts and undermine colleagues. Plus, the slightly-archaic language is refreshing for some reason.

(Side note: I was recently reading C. J. Guiguet's 1953 paper "An Ecological Study of Goose Island", which documents his surveys on the outer coast of Heiltsuk territory in 1948. He concludes the introduction with the following statement, which I found to be totally delightful and to represent a collegial spirit that seems to be totally missing from modern academia:

"I am especially grateful to Mr. P. W. Martin whose intimate and practical knowledge of the British Columbia coast and its fauna, whose skill at navigation and seamanship, and whose affable good fellowship, combined to make the Goose Island expedition both profitable and pleasant."

How is that not the loveliest thing you've read? And in an academic/scientific paper, no less!)

So, this article suggests that a number of apparently metamorphic animals that are or were believed to exist around the world are actually reflections of transformation stories in indigenous folklore.

A number of examples are cited, which point to species commonly understood to be biologically linked due to the intrusion of mythological beliefs into scientific thinking. These examples are meant to stand as "a demonstration of the existence in both the old and new world of a specific type of folk tale, a transformation motif explanatory of certain coincidences in natural history".

That is, species with notable life histories become ingrained in indigenous folklore due to things like confusion of similar species or species that share notable characteristics; extrapolation from conincident behavioral and life history similarities; and lost connections between two species held, for unknown reasons, to be mythologically linked.

Almost all of the examples cited are from the tribal Americas or relatively "untamed" parts of the world, and all of them involve the mythological transformation of one animal species into another animal species. With one exception.

That exception is the barnacle goose, which is also the only example from Europe to be included in the article. The barnacle goose is an "explanation by metamorphosis for the sudden appearance of large migratory flocks of geese". The barnacle goose is also interesting to me as the counter-example given by Mandeville when he's presented with the oddity of the vegetable lamb. In what basically amounts to a cross-cultural pissing contest of "my home has weirer things than your home", the barnacle goose allows Mandeville to coolly say "hey man, that lamb-sprouting tree is pretty sweet, but I'm unfazed - after all, I've seen birds grow on trees".

But the barnacle goose and the vegetable lamb share something else in common: they both represent a halted transformation from plant-to-animal or animal-to-plant, a cross-kingdom hybrid of fantastical weirdness. Unlike all of the other examples cited in the article, and all the fantastical creatures that punctuate Mandeville's Travels, these two funny beasts link completely different worlds.

So how do you understand them? Are they plants, or are they animals? Are they some third thing that I can't name because it no longer exists in my psyche or my science or my culture? Who knows?

Well, Gerard, author of a 1597 herbal, might know. He writes in his herbal:

"There are in the north parts of Scotland certain Trees, whereon do grow Shellfishes, etc., etc., which falling into Water, become Fowls, whom we call Barnakles; in the North of England Brant Geese; and in Lancashire Tree Geese, etc."

Trees sprout shellfish that produce birds, and the resulting anomaly is deemed appropriate fodder for an herbal.

I'm not so good at drawing categories, but neither am I able to wantonly mismatch a whole zoo/herbarium full of species in order to produce a creature worthy of comment.

More on barnacle geese later when I (re)read the chapter from "Before Disenchantment"!

Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival (article)

Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival: A Hypothesis concerning Relationships
By C. W. R. D. Moseley, for Modern Philology (1974)

This article makes some links between Mandeville and Chaucer and the poets of the Alliterative revival respectively. It attempts to explain why the early career of the Travels was limited in England to such an odd group of people, and how those writers may have used the Travels in their own writing.

In particular, Moseley names Chaucer, the Pearl poet and the poet of the alliterative Morte as borrowing from the Travels, though he comments that even in sections of their work that would make overlap and borrowing logical and easy, Mandeville is soundly ignored by Gower, Hoccleve, Langland, Usk and others. (Usk was a chump anyway.)

Useful points: a picture of the early importance of the Travels in English literary culture, including the suggestion that Mandeville’s images of the False Garden and the road to Earthly Paradise may have informed some elements of the visionary landscape of Pearl (184).

Plant Folk Medicines (article)

Plant Folk Medicines among the Nicobarese of Katchal Island, India
By H. S. Dagar and J. C. Dagar, for Economic Botany (1991)

First, I am kind of offended by the idiotic point of view that one can stay with an indigenous community for “several days” (115) and in doing so “create confidence in them to reveal” (115) their ancient sacred practices.

That aside, this article details the folk medicinal use of plants naturally occurring on Katchal Island, India, by an indigenous group “living in complete geographical isolation” (115) with an unbroken history of interactions with local plants that date to time before memory.

For information on local use of plants encountered by Mandeville in India, I might refer to the significant list of plant species and usage summaries provided in the article. Given that the article only cites scientific names and I haven’t memorized the Latin for the plants Mandeville encounters, I probably won’t go ahead and do that for the hell of it, but for the record: note to self, this might be a helpful resource.