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.