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Introduction

Et cum circumdarent nos homines et respicerent nos tamquam monstra, maxime quia eramus nudis pedibus, et quererent si nos non indigeremus pedibus nostris, quia supponebant quod statim amitteremus eos, ille Hungarus reddidit eis rationem, narrans eis conditiones Ordinis nostri.

(People gathered round us, gazing at us as if we were freaks, especially in view of our bare feet, and asked whether we had no use for our feet, since they imagined that in no time we would lose them. And this the Hungarian explained to them, telling them the rules of our Order.) (Itinerarium 28.4)

William of Rubruck writes these words upon his return to Acre after a two-year mission to Mongolia from 1253 to 1255, as part of his report to King Louis IX of France on the state of Mongolian society and customs, one of the medieval period’s most vivid ethnographic accounts. Here he is describing his immediate reception at the imperial court of the great khan, Mangu, where locals not only surround him and members of his Franciscan retinue, wondering at their display of bare feet in the subfreezing weather of Mongolian winter, but stare at them as if they were some kind of monsters, tamquam monstra. William is thus describing himself as he is seen in the gaze of the other he has come to describe, a feat striking, even disorienting, to modern and medieval audiences alike—the former who might not expect to find a mode of postmodern, self-reflexive ethnography in a medieval sampling of the genre, and the latter who might well turn to ethnographic reports with an interest in hearing of the world’s exotic and monstrous races, not to learn that they are themselves seen as monstrous by diverse, little-known others. Surely William’s moment of self-mirroring and even self-othering is exceptional and rare?

This book, on the contrary, tracks the persistent presence of such moments of startling and uncomfortable self-reflexivity and self-consciousness in some of Europe’s earliest and most celebrated ethnographic descriptions—descriptions of observed manners and customs of cultural and religious outsiders. The ethnographic authors treated here, Gerald of Wales in his description of the twelfth-century Welsh, William of Rubruck among the Mongols, Jean de Joinville in his account of the various Muslim “Saracens” encountered on the Seventh Crusade, and the Mandeville author in his description of the world’s diverse faiths from the Holy Land to the Far East, display an uncanny ability to see and write from the perspective of the others whom they mean to describe. They see and write, that is, “in light of another’s word”¹—relationally, dialogically, from more than one vantage point. Together their texts elaborate, I argue, a distinctive late medieval ethnographic poetics, one marked by a distinctive outlook on ethnographic encounter: a profound openness to alternative perspectives and voices; attention to the limits and hence dangers of taking a single-point European or Latin Christian perspective in engaging with cultural diversity; and frequent exposure of the discomfort experienced by Europeans in confronting and thinking through unfamiliar words and worldviews, in opening their own systems of thought to competing languages and having their beliefs thus “dialogized”—and relativized—through the encounter. Such openness and attraction to non–Latin Christian voices in a genre about outsiders certainly challenges the image of an insular and inherently xenophobic European Middle Ages. On the other hand, I do not wish to suggest that these medieval writers embraced alterity as early exponents of modern cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism,² or that these positions came naturally or easily to them. Rather they are each motivated, for different reasons tied to particular circumstances I will set forth in the individual chapters, to leave their narratives open to alternative perspectives and voices in spite of the considerable risks these posed to the stability of their overall personal and narrative perspectives, as well as to dominant Latin Christian beliefs and governing orthodoxies of their day.

The texts displaying such a striking poetics, moreover, derive not from the margins but rather the canonical centers of Europe’s emerging genres of empirical ethnographies and literatures of observation. As scholars are increasingly appreciating, in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Europe’s growing encounters with cultural difference through various cultural contact zones³—from zones of conquest along its own expanding borders to beyond, through missions, crusades, pilgrimages, and travels in the East—led to a growth in ethnographic curiosity about others and to the creative rebirth of empirical or observed ethnography, not seen in the West for some one thousand years.⁴ Unlike the modern discipline of academic anthropology, ethnographic writing has a long premodern history and can be found wherever and whenever discrete cultural groups have moved across their borders to collide with customs and mores at variance with their own and had the means and motivation to record those differences. We cannot expect to identify these new medieval ethnographers through self-designation as “ethnographers” or designation of their works as “ethnographies”—instead they used terms like “descriptio” (description), “itinerarium” (journey), and “travels” to title their narratives. These terms suggest the extent to which ethnographic writing coupled with other genres of travel, including geography, topography, cosmography, pilgrimage, crusade, ambassadorial reports, and missionary reports, in the medieval period, as indeed, it would continue to do so until the modern era, when professional ethnography finally replaced the long-running unprofessional observations and “practical ethnographical ‘science’ of merchants, navigators, missionaries … [and] colonial administrators.”⁵ But we can identify medieval ethnographic writers by a common language they share with each other and with modern practitioners of ethnography in describing their discursive aims. For the practitioners of early European ethnography consistently write of an intent to describe and record the differing manners and customs (Latin: “ritus et mores”; Old French: “coustumes”; Middle English: “maneres and lawes”) of the peoples they are observing.⁶ The twelfth-century renaissance of classical learning notwithstanding, the rebirth of ethnography in the late medieval period took place without direct access to its most relevant classical literary and scientific models, such as Herodotus’s Histories and Tacitus’s Germania, underscoring the role of direct observation in the growth of the new genre. Along the expanding borders of twelfth-century Europe, Adam of Bremen wrote extensive descriptions of Scandinavian and Baltic peoples, and his continuator, Helmold, wrote an account of the pagan Slavic customs and religious rites.⁷ Gerald of Wales, meanwhile, broke the mold of ethnography as an appendage to history to write arguably the first “ethnographic monograph” of the postclassical era, his Description of Wales.⁸ While the twelfth century saw such sporadic ethnographic activity, events of the thirteenth brought about an impressive spurt of ethnographic accounts of the Mongols, who had staged a series of devastating eastern European campaigns before suddenly receding in 1242 on the death of Great Khan Ogodei. Elected pope in 1243, Innocent IV responded both by renewing calls for a crusade on Europe’s eastern front and by organizing a series of missions to convert and collect information regarding the threatening empire to the east, which gradually came to be seen rather as a potential ally against the Muslims in the Middle East and as containing possible converts to Christianity. John of Plano Carpini’s mission of 1245–48 to Mongolia stands as an important breakthrough in empirical ethnography for its details and for classifications of Mongol life according to categories that recall Herodotus’s own.⁹ But it was the Flemish William of Rubruck’s mission of 1253–55, sponsored by Louis IX, that yielded the most outstanding medieval example of accuracy in observation, and the most immediate and realistic of accounts of the thirteenth-century missions to Mongolia, one still admired as a source on Asian religions of the era.¹⁰ Also in the thirteenth century, Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde (Description of the World), surviving in 130 manuscripts, set a future standard for lay ethnography in its attraction of a wide audience to ethnographic writing. Mandeville’s Travels, in the fourteenth century, indicated the full potential of that medieval and post-medieval audience for descriptions of worldly diversity, surviving in over 300 manuscripts and dominating the genre of travel and ethnographic writings well into the sixteenth century.¹¹ Of my sources, only Jean de Joinville’s crusader account of life in Egypt and the Latin Kingdom, filled though it is with ethnographic content, is newly being treated as a seminal medieval “ethnographic” work. Its inclusion in this study serves as an important corrective to the frequent exclusion of the Crusades as a source of ethnographic production.¹²

The implications of the dialogic poetics of such seminal early European ethnographic writers as Gerald of Wales, William of Rubruck, and the Mandeville author are profound, and, as I show, rather different than the implications of multifocality as it has been elaborated in other, adjacent medieval representational disciplines such as chronicle writing and painting.¹³ For the recourse to external perspectives on Europe in a genre about cultural difference evinces a new self-scrutiny and self-consciousness about European cultural identity as seen from an outside perspective, often enough a politically more powerful one: here, as elsewhere, dialogism emerges from the margins of power.¹⁴ Dialogic engagement with alternative perspectives, moreover, implies the incorporation and integration of that alterity within one’s own emerging self-definition, a thesis that has emerged in a number of recent “postcolonial medieval” studies of European encounters with difference.¹⁵ The result, rather than the consolidation of European cultural identity through the encounter with difference, or a European self-confidence prefiguring that to come in the era of New World conquests,¹⁶ is the loosening, relativizing, and redefining of European identity through such encounter. A genre about difference that ends up stressing the difference of the home culture; a genre about difference that, rather than consolidating the identity of its readers and writer, exposes that identity to new and destabilizing perspectives on it; a genre about difference that incorporates that difference as part of the home culture’s self-definition: all of this rather turns what we know and think about ethnography, rooted as most of those assumptions are in its modern manifestations, on its head.

And all of this makes ethnography composed in light of another’s word a difficult and dangerous proposition for medieval authors and their audiences. As the chapters that follow show, such a dialogic ethnography exposes ethnographer-writers as well as their audiences to the unfamiliar and heterodox voices, words, and gazes of medieval Europe’s others, and, inextricably linked to these, to medieval Europeans’ own considerable feelings of discomfort and disorientation before such worldly perspectives. In their display of such European disorientation, these ethnographies attest to a number of related features of late medieval European encounters that are central to the book’s thesis. First, they stand as a record of premodern affect: namely, of the uneasy, disquieting feelings that often attended engagements with difference in spaces of dialogic encounter in the premodern period. Far from simply celebrating worldly diversity, these intercultural ethnographic accounts instead attest to the difficulty of true intercultural engagement with alterity and to the frequent discomfort of self-scrutiny and self-consciousness before the gazes of cultural and religious others. They show that the voices and gazes of the other—rather than a mere projection or fantasy of that self as Orientalist criticism would suggest—amounted to an irreducible force capable of significantly disorienting the medieval European self. And they attest, perhaps above all, to the productive force of such disorientation, which pushed ethnographers and their audiences well beyond the anchoring stability of Latin Christendom’s received orthodoxies—those of crusade, mission, and classical anthropologies—into unscripted terrain, where there could and did emerge new modes of thinking about both self and other. Finally, such new modes of thinking and writing in light of another’s word signal the strikingly still open nature of European identity itself in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, an openness replete, as we will see, with both possibilities and hazards.

In tracing the reciprocal gazes of selves and others engaged in dialogic encounter, In Light of Another’s Word also uncovers a history of the premodern ethnographic gaze and of the visual poetics of ethnography before empire. These, I show, diverge in several, decisive ways from modern ethnographic poetics. As Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford have found in separate studies of ethnographic form, the conventions of twentieth-century “formal” ethnography developed in such a way as to deny the participation of the ethnographer in the field as observer, despite the fact that this participation has been a sine qua non of ethnographic authority in the modern era since the 1920s, just as it is intrinsic to claims to authenticity and authority in the major ethnographic works of the medieval period. In formal or “scientific” ethnography, “the subjectivity of the author is separated from the objective referent of the text.”¹⁷ The removal of the traces of the looking, recording ethnographer is effected to “conform to the norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject,” for according to scientific discourse, the “position of speech is that of an observer fixed on the edge of a space, looking in and/or down upon what is other.”¹⁸ This “objectivity” effect, as an array of critical anthropologists have argued, is afforded at the cost of the objectification of those being gazed at;¹⁹ or as Jean-Paul Sartre noted more generally of the modern gaze in the 1950s, “objectification is the telos of the look.”²⁰

The poetics of the dialogic ethnographies of In Light of Another’s Word are, by contrast, marked by rather different features. First, they exhibit a subjective approach to knowing the other, advancing a subjective view of social knowledge apprehension through the notion that accuracy is best achieved through multifocality, the accrual of ever more incomplete, “partial” (incomplete, subjective) perspectives on an object. This open-ended approach to representational truth is found in other foundational medieval representational disciplines, namely historiography and painting, which, as we will see, were close enough to the emerging field of ethnography to serve as an explicit model for some of its practitioners and implicit intellectual backdrop for all. What the medieval recourse to multiple perspectives in representational disciplines guaranteed was a more ambiguous, open-ended, and less coherent view of truth than any unifocal model allows, including and especially that of the modern ocular regime since the Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective.²¹ Rather than a gaze that aims for singular objectivity or totality in presenting knowledge about others, these writers repeatedly disclose the subjectivity and incompleteness of their gazes on others, implicitly or explicitly inviting the inclusion of other perspectives. Second, the ethnographies of this study are composed “deictically” (from deiknonei, to show), always referring back to the body of the speaker, and including information about the spatial and temporal relation of the speaker to his objects of description.²² They are thus, third, fundamentally relational or dialogic, plotting the subject-author’s relation to his objects, and, intersubjectively, theirs to him. Last, unlike modern ethnography, which emerged in the heyday of European empires when ethnographers cast inevitably complicit “imperial eyes” on native Asians and Africans and their customs, European ethnography before empire is characterized by more fluid, complex and unpredictable relations between Latin Christian subjects and their religious and cultural others,²³ and its gazes are likewise often more fluid and open-ended than the modern, fixed gaze of Orientalism and imperialism.²⁴ These differences of the medieval ethnographic gaze, when reinserted into the history of the Western gaze in relation to which they are rarely considered, complicate the conjoining of all Western techniques of visualization with the impulse to objectify, a critique forged by prominent cultural critics like Johannes Fabian and Edward Said.²⁵ Through intersubjective and dialogic gazing, the visual poetics of medieval ethnography offers an alternative story of the production of social knowledge in the West.

A range of studies of medieval vision and optics describe the differences of the premodern visual paradigm from modern, scientific ocular regimes in contexts outside ethnography and intercultural encounter. Suzannah Biernoff’s study of optics, for instance, argues that in the medieval visual paradigm, truth could not be and was not distanced from the viewing body because of a number of features distinguishing medieval vision from the modern, including the lack of separation between viewer and objects and the synthesis of scientific and religious thought.²⁶ Similarly, ancient and medieval optics’ extramission theory—whereby the subject’s apprehension of an object depends on an emission of some sort of activating radiation from the subject on the object, and thus a relationship between subject and object—has interested intellectual historians like Martin Jay as evidence of intersubjective understanding and a participatory view of subject-object relation in the medieval period.²⁷ And in medieval literary criticism, scholars have argued for an intersubjectivity manifest in medieval courtly literature through the blurring of subject-object boundaries in amatory gazes.²⁸ In describing the operation of the premodern ethnographic gaze, I extend existing scholarship on the visual poetics of the gaze to a context addressed by neither critics of ethnographic form, who rarely focus on the premodern period, nor critics of medieval visual culture, who have not focused on ethnography or intercultural encounter. At the same time, I advance recent studies of premodern travel and encounter into the realm of poetics.

My first chapter, “Conquest, Conversion, Crusade, Salvation: The Discourse of Anthropology and Its Uses in the Medieval Period,” surveys the sources of medieval ethnographic ideas regarding religious and ethnic difference found in the book. The chapter traces the discourse of medieval anthropology as it emerged to meet the challenges of human religious and cultural difference in five distinctive realms in the late medieval period: the conquest of the twelfth-century colonial fringe, the advancement of thirteenth-century missions to Asia, the theorization of non-Christian rights and responsibilities abroad, efforts to know the proximate Muslim enemy, and the theorization of the salvation of virtuous, primitive non-Christians. Each of these realms of anthropological activity was not only central to the overall development of anthropological thinking in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries but also serves as background to the particular chapters on medieval ethnography that follow.

I then turn to the dialogic ethnography of medieval Europe. Chapter 2, “Subjective Beginnings: Autoethnography and the Partial Gazes of Gerald of Wales,” plots the doubled voice of Gerald’s novel Descriptio Kambraie, a description of Welsh mores at once from a colonial, Anglo-Norman perspective underwritten by twelfth-century evolutionary anthropology and from the perspective of Wales’s own mythic traditions of resistance and redemption. I show how the Descriptio’s rhetorical duality is typical of “autoethnography,” ethnographic self-description that selectively appropriates colonialist representations in order to intervene in them. I argue that part of Gerald’s intervention in colonial processes is the very act of writing the Descriptio itself, an act of “salvage anthropology” aimed at preserving a snapshot of contemporary Welsh manners and customs under increasing colonial infringement and Anglo-Norman acculturation. I close by considering the visual poetics of Gerald’s gaze in the Descriptio, tracing the sources of his bifocality both in the representational disciplines of historiography and painting and in his own ethnic hybridity. The specificities of Gerald’s ethnic hybridity apart, Gerald’s insistence on the subjectivity, incompleteness, and partiality of medieval ethnographic description initiates a thread that runs through the whole of this study.

Chapter 3, “Writing Ethnography ‘In the Eyes of the Other’: William of Rubruck’s Mission to Mongolia,” is devoted to Friar William of Rubruck’s record of Mongolian customs, the Itinerarium, written during his stay in that empire from 1253 to 1255. The chapter on the whole demonstrates how Christian universalism, which would become synonymous with a lack of receptivity to cultural difference in later eras, in fact features a great self-extension toward the other in late medieval practice. I first show how William eschews readily available European discourses of Mongol barbarism and demonization in favor of a representation of reasonable Mongol customs. I then show how the salvation aim structures William’s representations, not only its profoundly detailed observations of Mongol life but also his depiction of his own religious and cultural difference from the viewpoint of his would-be converts. For contemporary preaching manuals predicated the preacher’s success abroad on the disorienting and counterintuitive ability to externalize his own Christian viewpoints and to “see as other,” as non-Christians see, a skill over which William shows mastery at the great interreligious debate at Caracorum. What is born of such ability to “see as other” is a dialogic ethnography composed as much in light of the other’s gaze as one’s own.

Chapter 4, “Casting a ‘Sideways Glance’ at the Crusades: The Voice of the Other in Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis,” treats the fascinating events of the Seventh Crusade (1248–50) of Louis IX as later recorded in 1309 by his companion and seneschal, Jean de Joinville. Readers of this crusade account soon find that military endeavor slides into complex negotiations, which themselves turn on a veritable trove of shared vocabulary and cultural citations inherited from some two centuries of crusade contacts between Latin Christians abroad and local Muslims that testify to a working, dialogic, and syncretic Islamo-Christian culture on the ground. At the same time, Joinville shows the disorienting effects of partaking in the Vie’s many conversations with Muslims, of being pulled into inhabiting the perspective of the other: we watch as Muslim voices and views dialogize with Joinville’s own, casting their own heretical “sideways glances” on official Christian perspectives to produce an alternative, heterodox image of the crusading endeavor.

Chapter 5, “Dis-Orienting the Self: The Uncanny Travels of John Mandeville,” describes the way that at each turn the Travels’ narrator performs the Christian self’s uncanny and unsettling indistinguishability from its would-be pagan and Muslim “others.” One might, with reason, say that such slippage is the logical end point of the cultural and religious interpenetration observed in previous chapters. But, as I argue, the crisis of the uncanny in the Travels ultimately finds its source in the fourteenth century’s preoccupation with the question of non-Christian salvation and what, if anything, distinguished Christians from other religious communities. Of all the texts of the book, the Travels perhaps best reflects the poetics of writing “in light of another’s word,” displaying episodes that foreground external perspectives on Latin Christian practices, cite from the voice of the other, demonstrate the disorienting effects of other words and worlds on the European self abroad, and insist on the limits and contingencies of the European gaze—and of Latin Christian claims of universalism—upon and within a diverse world.

It is a critical commonplace that the European Middle Ages have frequently been constructed in relation to the modern era, whether as its backward and savage antithesis or, conversely, as a time of relative liberation from modernity’s political and social discontents. Yet the ethnographic evidence of this study suggests something far more nuanced than either of these familiar poles allows. If the writers of In Light of Another’s Word break with expectation in dialogically representing the other in his own words and language, so seemingly prefiguring the ideals of intersubjective ethnographic practice in the postcolonial period, their texts illustrate that they did so at great personal discomfort and risk in the face of the governing orthodoxies of their day. That we can hear the voices of medieval Europe’s others in these narratives in spite of these orthodoxies allows us to take full measure of the forces of productive disorientation and destabilization at work on these early ethnographic writers through word- and world-altering encounter.