Larry Swain
Bemidji StateUniversity
Book Review
Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European
Ethnography in the Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia,
2014), 216 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4562-2
1> The
author has presented a study of high and late medieval texts that address the
notion of “other” outside the borders of Western Europe. As the Europeans became
more aware of the peoples beyond their limits due to the Crusades and other
events, fitting these new peoples into the “chain of being” as understood by
Western Europeans became a paramount intellectual concern. The subjects chosen
for the study display an ability to describe these newly encountered “others”
from the perspective of those being studied, or at least so the book and
publisher claim. After an introductory chapter and a chapter establishing the
theoretical approaches, Khanmohamadi examines the writings of Gerald of Wales,
Jean Joinville, William of Rubruck, and the pseudonymous John Mandeville from
the perspective of how they describe others.
2> Although
the classical and medieval periods knew no specific genre of literature as
“ethnography”, nonetheless descriptions of encountered peoples and their habits
and cultures was a part of several types of literature: historiography,
geography, and travel narratives are among the most common and readily
available. Khhanmohamadi states the texts are linked by an observational
approach: the authors are describing directly and interact with those the
medieval author describes. As such they share a “dialogical poetics” which
according to author was an attempt to enter into a “dialogic engagement with
alternative perspectives.” The authors studied are categorized into five
“distinctive realms”: Norman takeover of Wales in the late twelfth century, the
missions to the Far East of the thirteenth, the attendant discussions of
Christian responsibility and the theorization of the salvation of non-Christian
peoples who were seen as primitive. The book examines one author in each
“realms of anthropological activity” which the author argues are central to
medieval ethnography of the late Middle Ages.
3> The
brief introduction sets up the central issues address in a succinctly written
eleven pages. Then in the first chapter Khhanmohamadi lays out the theoretical
underpinnings of her approach. Though only slightly referred to explicitly, the
foundation of this study is in the theoretical of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly
The Dialogic Imagination. She begins
with a dualistic approach: the discourse of Christianity and the discourse of
civility. Khhanmohamadi divides these two tradents; the Christian of course
comes through the Bible and the fathers that is described as interested in
conversion of the non-Christian. “Civility” or evolutionary anthropology as the
author begins to call it derives from Lucretius through Cicero and in the
author’s words becomes “classical anthropology” (pg. 15). Khhanmohamadi
describes this as simply the notion of progress so familiar to us: humanity
began as a primitive and developed, evolved into what is now the apex of
civilization (at least so far). Of course, from a medieval perspective, the
Western Europeans were that apex, and the other was less developed and
barbaric. The remainder of the first chapter applies these dichotomous notions
to the authors the meat of the book will then examine in some detail.
4> Chapter
2 studies Gerald of Wales, in particular, his Descriptio Cambriae. The principle argument is that Gerald
incorporates in his description multiple perspectives, a literary rendering of
contemporary visual artistic representations in which several angles were
represented simultaneously. Chapter 3
turns to William of Rusbruck and his report on his missions to the East. The
central problem here is determining what groups are capable of salvation and
which not. William is faced when meeting the Mongols who are so other that they
do not fit the familiar discussions of savage and civilized, forcing William to
consider them in a new way, in a way comparative to the new study of optics
contemporary in the thirteenth century. In the following chapter, Khhanmohamadi
depends on Bakhtin’s notions of the monologic (official, authoritative) and
heteroglossic (unscripted, unofficial, unauthorized) and applies that dichotomy
to Joinville’s Vie de St. Louis. Joinville
includes both types of speech, the heteroglossic often in opposition to the
monologic, the former undercutting the latter. In the final chapter, the author
turns to a different genre altogether in Mandeville’s
Travels. She argues that the uncanny and marvelous aspects of the text are
there as a commentary on contemporary concerns regarding the salvation of the
other, human and nonhuman others.
5> There
is much to question in this book, in large part the fundamental assumptions. While
the author claims several times throughout the book that the Medieval period
lacked the ethnographies of the classical world naming specifically Herodotus
and Tacitus, this is not precisely true. While those authors are largely absent
from the Middle Ages, other classical authors who wrote what we would
ethnography certainly were read, anthologized, and passed on through multiple
summarizers, imitators, and transmitters of tradition. Among these would be
Caesar, translations of Josephus,
Pliny and his Natural History, Solinus,
Julius the Orator to name a few. In addition, there are more fantastical texts
that purport to record ethnographic materials that are read in the early
medieval period. Among these are texts such as the Liber Monstrorum, Letter to
Aristotle, and the so-called Wonders
of the East. Early medieval authors themselves also wrote ethnography in
various guises, ethno-history and furthering classic ethno-geography. Bede,
Isidore, Gregory of Tours, Peter the Deacon are among the more common names. And
even classical sorts of geographies were imitated such as in Ps. Hieronymous’ Aethici Istrici Cosmographia of the 7th
or 8th century. When the author claims that Helmod and Adam of
Bremen of the 11th century are the first to begin to once again
break ground in writing ethnography about the Northmen and the Slavs, she has
overlooked medieval commentary on the Vikings and Slavs that predate these
writers, Dudo of St. Quentin for example or Widukind of Corvey.
6> A
further issue is characterizing Lucretius and Cicero as proponents of “evolutionary
anthropology.” While this is certainly the view of older scholarship from a
century ago, some of which Khhanmohamadi cites, others have shown that the view
of progress detected in these authors is also mitigated by other comments the
authors make. Keller’s classic study on Lucretius and progress put that one to
rest (A. C. Keller, “Lucretius and the Idea of Progress,” CJ 46 (1951), 185-8). Both Cicero and Lucretius were writing as the
Roman Republic fell apart and both were familiar with the Hesiodan structure
where the primitive past was the golden age and their present an age of iron
and nothing either of them wrote changed that essential view especially in
light of the events of the late Republic. So while there is certainly influence
of Lucretius through Cicero on ideas percolating in the minds of Medieval
authors, evolutionary anthropology was not one of them.
7> The
fifth chapter is in my view the weakest. Khhanmohamadi sometimes cites examples
from Mandeville that are later interpolations, and certainly one of the central
tenets of the book’s arguments is difficult to maintain if the author of the
text is not a real ethnographer and is patching together references from
previous works. Further, if Mandeville fits in this category certainly also
does Marco Polo or even the Liber
Monstrorum or any of a dozen other travelogues of the period.
8> While
more could be said, there is also much that is excellent in this book. The
three chapters in the middle of the book are fascinating and informative. Noting
that Gerald and William’s works and approaches are similar to contemporary
artistic and scientific activities that results in a “deitic and perspectival
approach to ethnographic objectivity.” This is certainly a unique way of
examining Gerald’s ambivalence as a Welshman and a Norman. A close reading of
William’s reconsideration of categories for those who could be saved and were
human and those beyond that pale. William we are told reshaped the conversation
demonstrating a “fluidity” between William the viewer and the Mongols the
viewed.
9> The
chapters do fit neatly into themselves, offering multiple views on late
medieval ethnographic writing. Gerald is an “autoethnographer” writing about
the habitus of his own people utilizing techniques from visual arts in a
literary fashion. William, like the optics of his day, is changing the way the
world was viewed and looks through Mongol eyes in so far as a thirteenth
century author could. Joinville uses different registers of speech to
communicate and describe the Muslims of Egypt. These three chapters offer a
significant argument for how medieval ethno-geographers and travel writers used
dialogic modes in their subjective interaction with those they describe. Further,
Khhanmohamadi argues that the authors were cognizant of their subjectivity and
dialogic (what they would call rhetorical) modes.
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Larry Swain is Chair of the English Department at Bemidji State University. Swain specializes in Anglo-Saxon studies and teaches courses in linguistics, medieval languages, and medieval and early modern literature. Swain also edits the journal The Heroic Age and is involved in the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture project and blogs at The Ruminate and Modern Medieval.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight (2015): Dialogues
& Exchanges
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