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.
Showing posts with label examining authenticity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label examining authenticity. Show all posts
Monday, November 15, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet? (article)
Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet?
by Berthold Laufer for T’oung Pao
Who was it that told me that if the title of your article can be answered with a “yes” or a “no”, you shouldn’t bother writing it?
Spoiler alert!!! The answer is NO.
Okay, really, I liked this article. I think Laufer is one helluva smart cookie. Here, he basically tackles two questions: was Odoric ever in Tibet (he is credited with being the first European traveler there), and is the information he presents eyewitness or simply hearsay?
Now, it is easy for me to get distracted by shiny side-paths of small scholarly questions that have nothing whatever to do with Mandeville and his plants. This is one of those things. For some reason, I find Odoric and the map of his travels to be totally fascinating. But let me try to be a little focused here, yes?
For my purposes, it’s really interesting to witness Laufer’s method of examining Odoric’s writing in order to determine the authenticity of his words. Looking at his specific language in terms of his concept of self in place, and how specific details of his work compare to the writing of his contemporaries – holding Odoric against now more or less universally-acknowledged ethnographic and anthropological truths – assessing the author’s style and character to measure his powers of observation and clarity of writing – Laufer’s got a lot of tricks up his sleeve.
Even though he ultimately robs Odoric of his reputation for being the first European to traverse Tibet, he does so with such grace and tact that Odoric himself probably would have shook his hand and thanked him for the corrective measure. What a class act.
by Berthold Laufer for T’oung Pao
Who was it that told me that if the title of your article can be answered with a “yes” or a “no”, you shouldn’t bother writing it?
Spoiler alert!!! The answer is NO.
Okay, really, I liked this article. I think Laufer is one helluva smart cookie. Here, he basically tackles two questions: was Odoric ever in Tibet (he is credited with being the first European traveler there), and is the information he presents eyewitness or simply hearsay?
Now, it is easy for me to get distracted by shiny side-paths of small scholarly questions that have nothing whatever to do with Mandeville and his plants. This is one of those things. For some reason, I find Odoric and the map of his travels to be totally fascinating. But let me try to be a little focused here, yes?
For my purposes, it’s really interesting to witness Laufer’s method of examining Odoric’s writing in order to determine the authenticity of his words. Looking at his specific language in terms of his concept of self in place, and how specific details of his work compare to the writing of his contemporaries – holding Odoric against now more or less universally-acknowledged ethnographic and anthropological truths – assessing the author’s style and character to measure his powers of observation and clarity of writing – Laufer’s got a lot of tricks up his sleeve.
Even though he ultimately robs Odoric of his reputation for being the first European to traverse Tibet, he does so with such grace and tact that Odoric himself probably would have shook his hand and thanked him for the corrective measure. What a class act.
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