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)

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.

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.

The Barometz, or Tartarian Lamb (article)

The Barometz, or Tartarian Lamb
By M., for The Irish Penny Journal (1841)

This short column from the Irish Penny Journal sets out to disprove the myth of the vegetable lamb and indulge in the “innocent amusement” (316) it provides. The writer claims to have found a description of the vegetable lamb “in an account of Struy’s Travels through Russia, Tartary, &c.” (316) – dating to the seventeenth century – and summarizes the phenomenon as follows:

“The object of wonder was in this case the Scythian or Tartarian lamb, a creature which, it was stated, sprang from the ground like a plant, and, restrained to the spot on which it was produced, devoured every vegetable production within its reach, and was itself in turn eaten by the wolves of the country” (316).

The writer sensibly attributes the origin of this misunderstanding to the manipulated tree fern and lamb-shaped folk-art, concluding that these “ornamental additions [are] introduced to suit the taste of the narrator, and to pander to that love of the marvellous which prevailed in the age in which he lived” (316).

This little column, while hardly astonishing, marks the shift in imagination around the idea of the vegetable lamb that marked the end of its stand as a wonder of the world and its decline into a point of gentle foolishness that allowed the “modern” thinkers to poke fun at the preceding eras of cultural history.