Before Orientalism

Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510

Kim M. Phillips

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208948
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

A distinct European perspective on Asia emerged in the late Middle Ages. Early reports of a homogeneous "India" of marvels and monsters gave way to accounts written by medieval travelers that indulged readers' curiosity about far-flung landscapes and cultures without exhibiting the attitudes evident in the later writings of aspiring imperialists. Mining the accounts of more than twenty Europeans who made—or claimed to have made—journeys to Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Kim Phillips reconstructs a medieval European vision of Asia that was by turns critical, neutral, and admiring.In offering a cultural history of the encounter between medieval Latin Christians and the distant East, Before Orientalism reveals how Europeans' prevailing preoccupations with food and eating habits, gender roles, sexualities, civility, and the foreign body helped shape their perceptions of Asian peoples and societies. Phillips gives particular attention to the texts' known or likely audiences, the cultural settings within which they found a foothold, and the broader impact of their descriptions, while also considering the motivations of their writers. She reveals in rich detail responses from European travelers that ranged from pragmatism to wonder. Fear of military might, admiration for high standards of civic life and court culture, and even delight in foreign magnificence rarely assumed the kind of secular Eurocentric superiority that would later characterize Orientalism. Placing medieval writing on the East in the context of an emergent "Europe" whose explorers sought to learn more than to rule, Before Orientalism complicates our understanding of medieval attitudes toward the foreign.

PART I

Theory, People, Genres

Chapter 1

On Orientalism

The title Before Orientalism is at once a hook, a tease, and a statement of intent. The book could have been called Alongside Orientalism, or perhaps Between Orientalisms, without alteration to its fundamental arguments. Though Orientalist elements have been identified in medieval representations of Islam and Arab cultures, they apply much less to the rest of Asia. This chapter examines the chronology of the three main strands to Orientalism as they relate to medieval Europe’s more distant “Easts.” It finds that while elements of two out of the three may be tentatively identified in medieval writings on far eastern places, they do not add up to a version of Orientalism as defined by Said. A developed Orientalist discourse would have to wait until the early modern period or even beyond. Ultimately, late medieval writings on distant Easts are pre-Orientalist primarily because they are precolonialist.

Edward Said offered three interlinked definitions of Orientalism in his classic work. First, the European academic study of Asian societies; second, a tendency to group the diverse cultures of “the East” under one heading and those of “the West” under another to produce the binary distinction of “Orient” and “Occident”; and third—the most controversial one—an ideologically loaded discourse by which western societies have extended, developed, and justified political, economic, and other domination over eastern territories. This third element is best expressed by Said himself: “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient!”¹ Lucy Pick notes that the first two elements have, in Said’s presentation, an almost timeless, eternal quality, while the third arose in the eighteenth century in response to the “colonial aspirations of post-Enlightenment Europe.”² She and other medievalists have queried most aspects of his chronology with regard to the Middle Ages, especially concerning Latin Christendom’s relationship with Islam, but there has been less attention paid to Orientalism’s potential application to other Asian regions in the medieval era.

It must be said at the outset that few specialists in Middle Eastern or Asian studies have been persuaded by Said’s appraisal of scholarly endeavors by academic Orientalists.³ Indeed, his book has been found to be riddled with errors, flagrant omissions, and drastic overgeneralizations. Some of this critique will be discussed in what follows. On the other hand, Said’s concept has had wide utility and application when treated as a tool for interpreting certain western representations of subjected cultures, especially in literature and the visual arts, rather than as a reliable guide to entire branches of scholarship. Recurrent themes in cultural Orientalism include a tendency to portray Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian cultures as decadent, decayed, corrupt, and effeminate. Key elements are identified in Dawn Odell’s analysis of Jean-Leon Gerome’s painting The Snake Charmer (c. 1870), a reproduction of which adorned a 1979 edition of Said’s Orientalism. The painting represents a “European stereotype of the Orient as the site of danger, luxury, effeminacy, degeneration and superstition, including strong suggestions of sodomy, penetration and submission in the central figure of the boy and his position, bare-buttocks to the viewer.”⁴ In a colonial context such caricatures of the Orient and its inhabitants helped justify their submission to western powers. That, at least, is the broad argument.

Said focused first on the Middle East and Egypt, though his book makes regular passing references to south and east Asian contexts and his subsequent Culture and Imperialism extended the basic premise to colonial contexts including “Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean.”⁵ Other scholars have found his theories relevant, at least as a starting point, in studies of various Asian regions but particularly Japan, China, and India.⁶ Odell’s question—“Is this the Orient?”—is pertinent, as is her recognition that Said’s book posits a distinction between an authentic geographical location and its ideological construction in western representations.⁷ Said admits that his own “awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies” lies behind his initial Middle Eastern focus. He wanted “to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. That is why for me the Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention.”⁸ While acknowledging both the narrow and very broad geographical potential of the term, “Orientalism” is examined here primarily in relation to Asian regions beyond the Middle East.

It is in this sense that the book could be retitled Alongside Orientalism. Some scholars have explored medieval European representations of the Islamic East that reveal a tendency to eroticize, romanticize, and/or demonize contemporary Islam. Note, for example, Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s wide-ranging recent exploration of a specifically medieval “Orientalism” in representations of Islam and Saracens.⁹ Akbari explains that she excludes European views of east Asia from her study “simply to make clear the extent to which medieval Orientalism was shaped by a very specific discourse of religious alterity centered on the relationship of Christianity to Islam.”¹⁰ That is an important distinction, one with which the present book strongly agrees, though by no means does it intend to paint the medieval era as a pre-Orientalist “golden age, free of the representational violence inventoried by Said,” as suggested by some medievalists.¹¹

The three elements of Said’s “Orientalism” developed over different periods of time, so there cannot really be said to be a single point of origin. Said suggests that the discourse as “a field of learned study” dates to 1312, with the Council of Vienne’s decision to establish chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca, but his critics have found this either a little early or too late. Some have suggested the sixteenth or early seventeenth century as a better marker of concerted European scholarship on Oriental themes;¹² others have asserted the Council of Vienne’s efforts were “the last salute to a dying ideal” of Christian engagement with Islamic and Jewish philosophy.¹³ Such discussions focus on study of the Middle East, however, and the Islamic world in particular. European academic study of farther eastern cultures came later still.

France’s École Spéciale des Langues Orientales, now Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), was founded in 1795 within the Bibliothèque Nationale.¹⁴ French chairs in Chinese were established at the Collège de France in 1814 and École des Langues Orientales in 1843. Munich and Berlin also founded Chinese professorships in the early nineteenth century.¹⁵ France’s Journal Asiatique, first published in 1823, was slanted more toward coverage of far eastern than Arabic matters, reflecting developing interest in l’êxtreme orient over the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ In Britain the first chair in Chinese came in 1837 at University College, London, though it lapsed by 1843, and in 1851 a new one was endowed at King’s College, London. Oxford’s Bodleian Library began to collect Chinese books in the seventeenth century, but the university did not establish a chair in Chinese until 1876. Cambridge followed in 1886 and Manchester at the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁷ U.S. universities would quickly outstrip the British in this field following establishment of a chair at Yale in 1876 and strong development in the early part of the twentieth century.¹⁸ As T. H. Barrett chronicles in his study of Sinology in Britain, formal academic recognition was preceded by three centuries of book collection by individual European enthusiasts and missionaries and the scholarly endeavors of members of the various East India companies. Indeed, to an extent, scholarly enthusiasm for information on Asia can be seen even in the later Middle Ages given the grouping of writings on eastern contexts in single manuscripts.¹⁹ Yet given that study of Asian languages, which are at the heart of modern Asian studies, was hardly developed before the late eighteenth century, it is clear that formal scholarly interest in the far Orient was a postmedieval phenomenon.

The second sense of Orientalism, as a structure of thought or “imaginative geography” dividing the world between “East” and “West,” “Orient” and “Occident,” might seem rather older. Orient and Occident derive from the Latin for rising and falling, orior and occido, alluding to the sun’s apparent passage across the sky. Some educated medieval Europeans possessed a sense of “East” or “Orient” as opposed to “West” or “Occident,” but they were not preoccupied by the overarching binary inherent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism. Generalities about the East or Indies were attempted by numerous encyclopedists, cartographers, and cosmologists who were working out of classical and early medieval traditions but were challenged by travelers who ventured east from the mid-thirteenth century. Thus one can identify only a limited medieval “Orientalism” in Said’s second sense, and furthermore this would have to be modified by uncertainty about the existence of an opposing “West.”

“Oriens” appeared regularly on medieval mappaemundi, notably the “T-O” maps that survive in over a thousand exemplars, mostly as manuscript illuminations, from the seventh to late fifteenth centuries.²⁰ However, in this cartographic context Oriens refers not to a geographic area but to one of four cardinal points or the winds of the earth along with Occidens, Septentrio, and Meridies.²¹ “Asia” is used to mark the largest of the world’s three continents, filling the top half of the globe, with “Europa” and “Africa” filling the lower quarters. This tradition dates back to antiquity. Akbari shows that medieval authors’ attempts to match up the four cardinal winds with the three continents were often awkward; she also argues that while the concept of a “whole, homogenous East” can be identified in medieval encyclopedic texts, it lacked a mirroring West as representative of “us.” The East may be where “they” are; “It does not follow, however, that the West is where ‘we’ are.”²² Instead, Europeans were usually conceived as people of the cold North.²³ More recently she has proposed that an East-West binary becomes increasingly visible by the fourteenth century, in some lines from Gower’s Confessio amantis, for example, but the evidence for this contention seems scanty.²⁴ The Orient-Occident binary was known but not yet common in late medieval geographical thinking. The East was also considered in climatic terms, particularly by medieval scholars who incorporated the four directions into a quadripartite cosmology encompassing the four seasons and four humors. Most agreed that the East was “hotter” than the West, though there was disagreement over whether it was also wet or dry; William of Conches, for example, plumped for a hot, damp East, while Bartholomaeus Anglicus argued for hot and dry.²⁵

“India” was a common designation for large swathes of the Asian continent, particularly south and east, and was generally divided into three parts. “Nearer” or “Lesser” India often referred to the northern Indian subcontinent while “Further” or “Greater” India was the southern, though in Marco Polo the two are reversed. “Middle” or “Intermediate” India was Ethiopia—“half way to India.”²⁶ “Mandeville” focuses on climate rather than geography: India Major is very hot, India Minor is more temperate, and the third part, “to the north,” suffers extreme cold.²⁷ Alternatively, in some texts Further or Greater India extended indefinitely eastward from Malabar (the southwest Indian coast), as in Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, or from the Ganges, as in Poggio’s report of Niccolò dei Conti’s journey, encompassing east and southeast Asia.²⁸ Medieval “India,” however conceived, constituted a vaster range of territory than implied by its modern reference to the Indian subcontinent and potentially encompassed south, east, and southeast Asia as well as east Africa.

By the time that actual travelers began to produce accounts of Asia, earlier authors’ claims about the Indies or Orient had achieved authoritative status. For example, Honorius Augustodunensis, in his widely read Imago mundi (c. 1110, surviving in at least 160 manuscripts), had spoken of the great cities of the Indies, vast populations, great quantities of gold and silver, monstrous and remarkable creatures, ferocious nations of Gog and Magog who eat human and raw animal flesh, tribes of mountain pygmies who give birth at three and are old at eight, and people who kill their elderly parents, cut them up, and serve the flesh at banquets.²⁹ The tradition of the “Wonders” or “Marvels” of the East, already old by Honorius’s day, populated eastern realms with diverse monsters, marvelous beasts, and hybrid creatures.³⁰ There dwelt “Headless men with eyes and mouths in their breasts [who] are eight feet tall and eight feet wide”; “The donestre [who] live on an island on their own in the Red Sea. They are partly human. They can speak various tongues and can entice men whom they eat up, save for the head over which ...