ENGL 4371: Cultural Encounters in Early America

Prof. M. Householder

8/22-24: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

 

 

 

 

[For Thursday 8/24, choose an episode from any part of Mandeville’s Travels that interests you and write a brief analysis (1-2 pages, typed, double-spaced) of its underlying logic.  Does the episode express some fundamental similarity with European Christianity?  Some kind of perversion?  A violation of European sensibilities?  Self-directed anxiety?  What do you think the episode’s function is with respect to the overall text?]

 

 

 

1.      Why read Mandeville’s Travels in this course?  After all, although the narrative is about a European’s encounter with different cultures, the text first appears over 100 years (ca. 1356-1366) before Columbus sets foot in the Americas.  Moreover, “Mandeville” himself is obviously a fiction: what appears to be a unified account of one man’s travels is in fact many different travel accounts stitched together in order to appear more or less unified.  Despite its fictional status and anachronism, the text still teaches us several important things about how Europeans viewed their world, cultural difference, and the act of writing. 

 

 

 

a.      Its influence on real travelers.  Moseley: the “expectations aroused by Mandeville led the first discoverers to see the New World not objectively but in preconceived terms” (32). 

 

 

                                                                          i.      Its popularity. 

 

 

                                                                        ii.      It served as an authoritative cultural atlas for Europeans just beginning to venture across the seas. 

 

 

 

                                                                      iii.      Even after Europeans began publishing eye-witness reports, The Travels continued to appear in print, suggesting that the text had value for readers beyond factual information.  English language editions appeared in 1496, 1499, 1503, 1510, 1568, 1582, 1612, 1618, 1625, 1632, 1640, and 1650.  It was also anthologized by the two most important compilers of travel narratives, Richard Hakluyt (1589) and Samuel Purchas (1625).

 

 

 

                                                                       iv.      [A sidebar on doing primary document research on the web: using Early English Books Online (EEBO).]  Want to see Thomas East’s 1582 edition of Mandeville?  Here’s what you do:

 

1.      Go to SMU Library homepage.

2.      Click on “SMU Online Resources”

3.      Under “Indexes, databases” etc., click on “E” (for EEBO)

4.      Click on “Early English Books Online” (takes you to homepage; or save yourself a step and just type http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home into your browser.  Either way, you must be on an SMU, or other subscribing institution’s server!)

5.      Click “Search”

6.      Type “Mandeville” into keywords box

7.      32 hits!  Scroll down and find 1582 edition.  Click on camera to see images of the original pages.

             

 

 

b.     So, if the value of The Travels to 15th and 16th c. readers was not for its factual information, why did it continue to be popular among them (and therefore of interest to us)?  My thesis: The Travels took several different kinds of travel discourses and unified them under a single persona, effectively providing for Europeans a psychological profile for a prototypical European explorer: part intrepid crusader, part humble pilgrim, part wide-eyed curiosity/adventure seeker, part authority on scientific information. 

 

 

 

 

c.      The creation of this persona helped shape an important aspect of subsequent encounter literature: the centrality of narrative to the encounter experience.  Through its narrative structure, the Travels offered something different from geographical descriptions: it placed an individual Christian European subject at the center of the story, shifting the focus from the world to the traveler’s mediating experience of it. 

 

 

 

                                                                          i.      Pilgrimage as recovery. 

 

 

                                                                        ii.      Exploration and discovery. 

 

 

 

d.      The discourse of wonder and colonial aggression/anxiety. 

 

 

 

e.      The narrative plays out a fundamental psychological condition endemic to the traveling self’s encounter with the alien “Other”: the destabilizing effect of such encounters on self-definition.  Understood this way, the fragmentation of Mandeville’s Travels functions as a self-perpetuating cycle of destabilizing wonder and re-stabilizing language.  In this cycle, the alien world calls out for the European subject to organize it and make it familiar, while at the same time preserving a threat of disorder or perversion that provokes continual renewal of the subject’s being. 

 

 

 

 

2.      Alienation and the production of the (Christian European) subject.

 

a.      In the European Christian worldview, the Christian is always an exile and a pilgrim. 

 

 

 

 

b.      During the years of Islamic occupation of Jerusalem, pilgrimage—and its more militaristic cousin, the crusade—was an especially meaningful way for Christians to address the structural alienation at the heart of Christianity.  By walking the path to Jerusalem, the pilgrim reversed Adam and Eve’s journey, if not by returning exactly to paradise, then at least by returning to the scene where salvation was made possible. 

 

 

 

 

c.      The fall of Acre and The Travels as response to a crisis of dispossession.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

d. The Prologue introduces us to this crisis and the significance of Jerusalem.  It establishes the significance of the Holy Land in the Christian symbolic order.  The Holy Land is central to the coherence of the Christian world, as can be seen from this typical “T-O map” (linked to source at Henry-Davis.com). 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                          i.      Read p. 43. 

 

 

 

 

                                                                        ii.      Dispossession

 

 

 

                                                                      iii.      Disunity and Incoherence

 

 

 

 

                                                                      iv.      Aggressive Projection of the self

 

 

 

 

 

d.      Narrating epistemological crisis: Mandeville’s interview with the Sultan as an example of the Mirror of the Other. 

 

 

 

                                                                          i.      Discussion: What do you make of Mandeville’s encounter with the Sultan of the Saracens?

 

 

 

 

                                                                        ii.      Mandeville’s initial description of Islam reveals a fundamental sense of confidence about the righteousness of Christianity. 

 

 

 

 

                                                                      iii.      However, this confidence is soon displaced by a shocking revelation that shatters Mandeville’s confidence and throws him into his alienated state. 

 

 

 

 

                                                                      iv.      Anti-Muslim sentiment.

 

 

 

 

e.      The Tricky Part of My Argument:  From this originary moment, Mandeville’s narrative is retroactively projected to the beginning of the text, already anticipating its moment(s) of dispossession. 

 

                                                                          i.      The frustrated European/Christian desire for political and religious mastery will be restaged as the text’s first-half narrative of pilgrimage/recovery. 

 

                                                                        ii.      Simultaneously, the narrative projects forward to the second half of the text the anticipated (and illusory) mastery of the European Christian over the diversity of metonymic variations of Christian practice—the narrative of discovery.

 

 

f.        Read 129 mid. 

 

 

 

 

           

3.      “Many ways come to a single end.”  Pilgrimage as Recovery. 

 

 

 

a.      The pilgrim’s journey to the Holy Land is a way to recover order in a fragmented, chaotic world. 

 

 

 

b.      Romantic tales of failure. 

 

 

 

 

c.      Re-assembling relics. 

 

 

 

 

d.      As Mandeville comes closer to the Holy Land, and to the familial origin it represents, the anxious intrusiveness of his narrative voice diminishes. 

 

 

 

 

e.      But, as I have argued, it is not the pilgrimage that regenerates Mandeville, it is the knowledge that his project of recovery has already been prevented.  His project of self-recovery through recovery of the fragmented Christian Empire, the fragmented bodies of the saints, and the fragmented history of the Church has failed because the essential fragmentation which has motivated his narrative, the dispossession of the Holy Land, has still not been resolved. 

 

 

 

 

 

4.      Marvelous Rhetoric. 

 

 

 

 

a.      We can think of the second half of the book as an attempt to recoup the loss of the Holy Land ideologically, represented by the narrative’s continual re-staging of moments of wonder, moments that in some sense both duplicate and re-focus the originary moment of wonder in the narrative: Mandeville’s shocking realization of the Saracens’ ability to mimic European speech and appearance, to penetrate the weaknesses of European society, and to reflect back those weaknesses. 

 

 

 

 

b.      In his new role as explorer and observer, Mandeville becomes the European version of the Saracen spy, the all-knowing observer. 

 

 

 

 

 

c.      “[S]o many routes. . .where a man can go wrong, except for the special grace of God.”  Like the pilgrimage narrative, Mandeville’s discovery narrative is a narrative of failure, a discursive defense against the impossibility of his desire. 

 

 

 

 

 

d.      The wonders and marvels Mandeville describes function much in the same way relics did in part one. 

 

 

 

e.      Perhaps the most memorable examples of these marvels (demonstrated by their appearance in the many bestiaries of the day) are the representations of peoples with strange variations of morphology. 

 

 

 

 

f.        At other times, Mandeville shows Christians a thinly veiled mirror of themselves and their customs. 

 

                                                                          i.      Read 126.  The juggernaut.

 

 

 

                                                                        ii.      Cannibalism

 

 

 

 

 

g.      But just as Mandeville seems to be drifting toward similitude (again), he quickly and aggressively lashes out into a string of increasingly monstrous variations. 

 

 

 

                                                                          i.      Cynocephales (illus. 53)

                                                                        ii.      Cyclopes (illus. 54)

                                                                      iii.      Blemmyae (illus. 55)

                                                                       iv.      An example from Vespucci (anon., Of the New Landes, EEBO STC 7677)

                                                                         v.      Search Blemmyae at John Carter Brown Library’s Archive of Early American Images

 

 

 

 

h.      So what’s going on with Mandeville’s description of Tartary (146-59)? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i.        Other examples? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

j.         “There are other lands—if anyone wished to travel through them—by which men could travel right round the earth, and return, if they had the grace of God to keep to the right route, to their native countries which they set out from” (185). 

 

 

 

                                                                          i.      The mirror of the Christian Other, part II: Tibet.

 

 

                                                                        ii.      An example of a spoiled lord. 

 

 

 

k.      He ends as he began, “And I, John Mandeville, knight, left my country and crossed the sea in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1332; I have traveled through many lands, countries and isles, and have been on many honourable journeys, and many honourable deeds of arms with worthy men, although I am unworthy” (189). 

 

 

[For Tuesday, 8/30: Read selections from Columbus.  Recommended: Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 53-85.]