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.

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!

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.