Before Orientalism
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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.
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Before Orientalism
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
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Western Europeans did not suddenly develop a new, Orientalist sensibility in the early sixteenth century. A problem for early modern and modern historians is to identify at what point it becomes possible to speak of Orientalism as an explanatory framework for European writings about India and the far East. Joan-Pau Rubiés, for example, denies that the concept is adequate for describing Portuguese writing on India up to the end of the sixteenth century.58 Robert Markley also demonstrates that laudatory perspectives on China remained powerful right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.59 Both China and Japan, partly as a result of Jesuit influence that sought to emphasize those nations’ high levels of civilization and rationality, remained the subject of European admiration at least until the early eighteenth century.60 It appears that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the best available candidates for the high-water mark of Orientalism, in all senses of the word. Stereotyping, homogenizing, and demonizing became regular, but never inevitable, features of western discourse on far eastern regions only from the early eighteenth century. They were never more than part of the story, yet assertions of European superiority such as Samuel Purchas’s in 1613 (quoted below, pp. 63–64) may indicate the beginning of a sea change. His claims for European greatness are illustrative of the profound shift in consciousness wrought by European exploration and conquest of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That supreme secular self-confidence or ethnocentrism has few distant echoes in the writings of our medieval travelers (discussed further in Chapter 3), though confidence in religious rightness was second nature to medieval Latin Christians.
Orientalism”s lasting value is not in providing the answers but in offering a starting point for scholarship that can provide textured accounts of the complicated and many-layered views “westerners” of different eras have formed of Asian cultures. They have been wondering, curious, admiring, inquiring, envious, avaricious, possessive, superior, censorious, denigrating, stereotyping, and demonizing but not generally all at the same time. Medieval travelers knew nothing of the world that would succeed them. They could never have envisaged the extraordinary European takeover of later centuries. To them, Mongolia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Burma, the kingdom of Champa (southern and central Vietnam), and the multitudinous islands scattered across the ocean at the farthest reaches of their known earth represented new and fascinating worlds meriting diverse responses. The peoples of these places were variously regarded with fear, disdain, wonder, and awe and were the focus of wariness, curiosity, and pleasure. Conspicuously absent from medieval western responses to Asia was the urge so familiar in more recent times: the desire to possess.
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