In Light of Another's Word. Shirin A. Khanmohamadi

      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