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?