The Medieval Invention of Travel

Shayne Aaron Legassie

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226442730
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Critique littéraire

Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility.Exploring this phenomenon, The Medieval Invention of Travel draws on an impressive array of sources to develop original readings of canonical figures such as Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Petrarch, as well as a host of lesser-known travel writers. As Shayne Aaron Legassie demonstrates, the Middle Ages inherited a Greco-Roman model of heroic travel, which viewed the ideal journey as a triumph over temptation and bodily travail. Medieval travel writers revolutionized this ancient paradigm by incorporating practices of reading and writing into the ascetic regime of the heroic voyager, fashioning a bold new conception of travel that would endure into modern times. Engaging methods and insights from a range of disciplines, The Medieval Invention of Travel offers a comprehensive account of how medieval travel writers and their audiences reshaped the intellectual and material culture of Europe for centuries to come.

PART I

Subjectivity, Authority, and the “Exotic”

According to Giovanni Boccaccio’s biography of Dante, some early audiences of the Divine Comedy believed that its author had been—quite literally—to hell and back. While strolling one day through the streets of Ravenna, Dante reportedly overheard a group of townswomen marveling at him in hushed tones:

“Ladies, do you see that man who goes back and forth to Hell as he pleases, and returns with news about those who are there?” To which another of them naively (semplicemente) responded: “Truly, you are right: Do you not see how his beard is crisped and his complexion darkened (la barba crespa e il color bruno) by the heat and smoke of that place?” Hearing these words spoken behind him, and realizing that they were due to the women’s credulity, he was pleased by the high opinion they had of him, and—smiling a little—he moved onward.1

On the one hand a cautionary tale about the importance of leaving literary interpretation to the professionals, this anecdote also highlights the evidentiary limitations of one of the medieval travel writer’s most cherished bids for authority: an appeal to the physical travails of travel.2

Dante and Boccaccio were born into a world of expanding geographical and literary horizons—factors that inform the above-mentioned anecdote and that spawned novel forms of travel writing. Starting in the 1240s, European travel writers began following the Mongol Empire’s secure overland routes into central and East Asia. They returned with astonishing, improbable accounts of regions that had been but dimly known even to the Roman Empire. Prior to this point, travel writers tended to be monks or cathedral clergy, who wrote about places (such as the Holy Land or Rome) that had also been described in the works of ancient authorities. Most of them envisioned concrete and relatively unproblematic readerships—usually a royal patron or the religious community to which they belonged.

None of this was true for those who wrote about their travels to East Asia between 1240 and 1370. These authors were members of emergent and increasingly self-assertive groups: merchants, friars, and the nobility. Faced with the advent of new reading communities, most anticipated broad, socially mixed audiences who—like the women from Boccaccio’s vignette—might interpret their efforts in ways that they had not intended. The most common fears that travel writers voiced were that their accounts would be dismissed as untruthful or that they would fall into hands ill equipped to derive the benefits that they sought to impart to their readers.

References to travail were central to how exotic travel writers negotiated their amorphous and potentially fractious audiences. Previous scholarship on exotic travel writing during the Middle Ages has focused primarily on the analysis of ethnographic discourses and has underestimated the conceptual importance of travel to these works. However, even accounts that invest little rhetorical energy in detailing the experiences of their authors ask that their readers view the text’s geoethnographic descriptions through the lens of the pains and labors that produced them.

The rhetoric of travail was also leveraged by medieval readers of travel writing. Particularly successful accounts—like those of Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and John Mandeville—passed back and forth between clerical, courtly, and bourgeois readerships. As they did so, they were not only translated from one language to another, but often also revised to conform to the expectations of different audiences. Radical revisions of the text’s content and/or form were common. Many of these changes were ideologically motivated rewritings of the author’s statements about how and why he embraced the labors of travel and travel writing. What this means is that the manuscript tradition of any given account is also potentially a document of ongoing cultural debates about the nature of the benefits gained through travel—and about the role that travel writing plays in transmitting those benefits to others.

While monographs on individual travel writers such as Marco Polo and John Mandeville have examined manuscript traditions in order to identify broad areas of consensus and disagreement among medieval readers, surveys of exotic travel writing have made limited use of the evidence provided by manuscript variants. However, as the following two chapters will show, the medieval invention of travel was a project in which both authors and readers played essential parts (albeit to the occasional consternation of the former group).

CHAPTER ONE

Exoticism as the Appropriation of Travail

The Greek-derived word exotic entered into written English (via French) in 1600, in Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humor. The turn of phrase that marked its debut was fittingly sensationalist: “Magique, Witchcraft, or other such Exoticke Artes.”1 In 1633, Thomas Johnson’s revision of John Gerard’s The herball; or, Generall historie of plantes classified the fruit of the clove tree as “Exoticke,” in part because of the strange sensations that its English investigator experienced upon putting it inside his mouth.2 By 1650, exotic was both an adjective and a noun, applied not only to species and customs imported into England from “outside” but also to the resident aliens that were one’s neighbors and to foreign authors—both ancient and modern—whose works paved the way for one’s own scholarship. As these examples suggest, many early uses of exotic describe phenomena that, in après coup fashion, give rise to the very boundaries that supposedly preexist them and that they allegedly breach.

The rise of postcolonial studies prompted scholars of travel writing to consider how their objects of study participate in such ideologically motivated constructions of “the outside.”3 In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said remarked:

If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples.4

According to Said, exoticism is an aesthetic mode that reifies cultural difference in ways that alternately naturalize and dissemble the violent foundations of imperial hegemony: “The exotic replaces the impress of power with the blandishments of curiosity.”5 While Said focused on highbrow exoticism, Anne McClintock subsequently argued that the Victorian marketing of soap, fruit salts, and tea relied on exoticizing tableaux to sell not only household commodities but also nationalist and imperialist ideologies to masses who were not necessarily clamoring to read Flaubert or attend the latest production of Verdi’s Aida.6 Meanwhile, Gayatri Spivak and Graham Huggan have suggested that the literary works of authors from postcolonial countries are commodified by the Anglo-American academy in ways that perpetuate the exoticisms of the nineteenth century.7

Like the term exotic itself, postcolonial critiques of exoticism emerge from realities that postdate the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, there was a medieval analogue for the aesthetic mode that modern scholars call exoticism. This chapter focuses on one of medieval exoticism’s characteristic expressions: the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge. This term refers to a constellation of symbolic conventions, material practices, and structures of feeling that enabled medieval people to accrue social, political, and economic advantage through their association with the foreign. The travails of the traveler, and the symbolic appropriation thereof, were the foundation of this economy.

Anthropologist Mary W. Helms has shown that, in nearly all preindustrial societies, the field of inquiry that we call geography overlaps significantly with cosmology.8 For this reason, the act of overcoming geographical distance is charged with the powers of the sacred. Because knowledge of faraway lands attains this mystical character, it proves fundamental to cults of royal and priestly charisma. In some cultures, monarchs and high priests bolster their authority by traveling to distant places in person, returning as what Helms calls “long-distance specialists.”9 In others, elite persons appropriate the mystique of long-distance specialists without ever leaving their native lands, through ensuring their privileged access to foreign visitors and the exotic commodities that accompany them. Among medieval rulers, this second approach tended to prevail over the first (which might partially explain the ambivalence of medieval attitudes toward the heroic travels of Ulysses and Alexander the Great). Long-distance specialists also stand to profit by making their labors available for appropriation, economically (through financial awards and social promotion) and symbolically (through their prestigious proximity to the powerful).

Just as the critical interrogation of nineteenth-century exoticism cast the era’s attitudes toward travel and travel writing in a new light, an appreciation of the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge is indispensable to analyses of the same phenomena in the Middle Ages. This is certainly the case with two frequently compared works of travel writing: the Itinerarium of William of Rubruck (1253) and the Divisament dou monde of Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa (1298). Scholars have often treated the Itinerarium and the Divisament as a contrasting diptych. The account of William of Rubruck is generally lauded for its skepticism, its dialogic approach to ethnographic description, and its vivid, personal rendering of its author’s experiences.10 Featuring “a plot and a character,” the Itinerarium balances narrative and exoticizing description in a way that conforms to modern expectations of how travel writing should be done.11 By contrast, the Divisament is faulted for confining its discussion of the Polo family’s experiences to a slim preface. The rest of the bulky work is given over to impersonal geoethnographic descriptions of Asia, with occasional anecdotes about Marco’s travels scattered throughout. Even Polo’s nineteenth-century champion Henry Yule conceded that, in the Divisament, “impersonality is carried to excess.”12 Making matters worse for the Divisament is its allegedly crude style, particularly its penchant for oral-formulaic refrains and its inconsistent use of the first-person narrative voice.13

Recent scholarship has softened the tone of such negative comparisons, observing that Polo and Rustichello did not set out to write a first-person travel narrative. However, there is still no consensus about what they actually did intend to write.14 The unanswered question of why these texts might have adopted the formal and stylistic tendencies that have shaped their critical fortunes is a compelling one. After all, it was not inevitable that William of Rubruck—even though he was writing a letter—would situate his description of the Mongol Empire within the framework of a relatively continuous first-person narrative. Likewise, nothing prevented the makers of the Divisament—a work that drew heavily on the conventions of Arthurian fiction—from embedding geoethnographic description within the framework of a highly subjectivized series of episodes based on Polo’s real-life adventures.

In following pages, I argue that the formal tendencies that distinguish the Itinerarium from the Divisament are more meaningfully contextualized as traits that allow the two works to express their divergent attitudes toward the role played by the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge in cross-cultural exchanges with the Mongol Empire. The notorious instability of the “I” in the Divisament and the work’s apparent suppression of Marco’s experience are deliberate choices that allow the work to rationalize its transformation of Polo’s travails into a novel kind of exotic commodity: a travel book designed for lay readers within—and outside—courtly settings. The displacement of Polo allows the Divisament to bring the figures of Khubilai Khan and Rustichello to the fore, a rhetorical maneuver that is key to the work’s self-rationalization. By contrast, the prominence of the first-person voice in William’s account asserts his alienation from the materialism and cultural relativism of the Mongol court. Among its other narrative effects, the “I” of the Itinerarium registers its author’s resistance to the manner in which he is exoticized by his foreign hosts. William ultimately concludes that the relativistic impulses of courtly exoticism are structurally incompatible with the universalizing claims of his faith, a conviction that prompts the Franciscan—whom modern readers have admired for his urbanity—to call for a crusade against the Mongol people.

EXOTICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: WILLIAM OF RUBRUCK

In 1253, Friar William of Rubruck subjected himself to a harrowing trek from the Crimea to Caracorum, where he stayed at the court of Mongol ruler Möngke Khan (ruled 1251–59). At some point prior to this journey, William had been sent by his order to the Palestinian port town of Acre, at the time still under Latin Christian control. It was there, or perhaps in Cyprus, that William crossed paths with king and future saint Louis IX of France, who was about to lead his followers into the disastrous Seventh Crusade. Taking advantage of William’s plans to visit the western edge of the Mongol Empire, Louis asked the Franciscan to carry a royal “letter of friendship” to the Mongol baron Sartach, who had reportedly converted to Christianity.15 The French king also donated lavish books, liturgical instruments, and probably traveling money, all intended to support William’s ministry. Upon his return to Acre in 1255, William of Rubruck discovered that his royal patron, having suffered crushing defeat and captivity at ...