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.
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