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a
Medieval Travel Writing and the
Question of Race
Linda Lomperis
Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Stanford University
Stanford, California

It is tempting to read premodern European travel writing as a body of work

that speaks directly to and hence increases our knowledge of the so-called
monstrous races or cultural others of Western Europe in the late Middle
Ages. After all, not only do the texts themselves frequently voice their own
explicitly descriptive designs, but twentieth-century scholarship has also
contributed a great deal to our understanding of their habitations and positionings within the premodern world.1 In a number of cases, for example,
we have come to know much about matters of authorship, social provenance, and circumstances of composition. A number of the surviving manuscripts, moreover, are either glossed, illuminated, or both, thereby providing
evidence of contemporary readership and critical reception, as well as a sense
of the value these texts may have had for their earliest audiences.2 And yet,
despite the obvious usefulness of this kind of historicist scholarship, it still
leaves open the considerable interpretive work needing to be done in order to
assess what sorts of functions these travel texts may have had within their
original historical settings. The guiding assumption in this essay is that premodern travel narratives deserve to be read not simply as windows onto the
world, but rather as documents of critical historical understanding in their
own right, as documents, that is to say, which comment critically on the historical conditions out of which they emerged. My intention in what follows
is to focus more specifically on processes of critical historical understanding
at work in several premodern travel texts, and in so doing, to shed new light
on the ruses of both premodern and postmodern racial imagination.
Before looking more carefully at the premodern texts themselves,
I would like first to address several questions that specifically pertain to
the issue of ethnographic textual interpretation. When a piece of writing
explicitly announces itself as an ethnographic account, must we as readers
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:1, Winter 2001.
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simply take that text at its word and recognize it as a reliable description
of cultural others, or should we instead contemplate the ways in which
ethnographies tend to produce the very others that they also purport to
describe? Must we view ethnographic writing, in other words, as itself a
kind of othering practice? And if so, to what extent does the complicated,
uncertain end of ethnographic writing, namely, the production of an
ethnographic object of study, suggest an equally complicated and uncertain situation of beginning, namely, the textual inscription of ethnographic
subjectivity? As James Clifford has observed, ethnographic work is necessarily enmeshed in a world of enduring and also changing power inequalities,
and it is for this reason that the function of ethnographic writing must
be understood as complex, often ambivalent, [and] potentially counterhegemonic.3 Setting forth the cultural text as a speaking subject in its own
right, as that which sees as well as is seen, [that which] evades, argues, [and]
probes back, Clifford presents ethnography as a kind of power-laden dance
in which observer and observed routinely become confused, and culture
itself no longer becomes the province of any one figure of control. Cultures do not hold still to have their pictures taken, Clifford reminds us:
errors and errancies are the province of any and all projects of cultural
description. Cliffords discussion of ethnographic writing thus urges us to
recognize it not as a snapshot account of others who stand frozen in time,
but rather as a dialogical, in-between space where many voices clamor for
expression, and especially as an inscription of communicative processes
that exist, historically, between subjects in relations of power.4
Interestingly enough, premodern travel texts provide striking illustrations of a number of these insights. Consider, for example, John of Plano
Carpinis thirteenth-century travel account History of the Mongols, in which
Plano Carpini describes the inquisitory journey that he made from Italy
eastward to the imperial seat of Guyuk Khan, ruler of the vast and powerful Mongol empire.5 One distinctive feature of this narrative is the considerable attention it devotes to realistic detail. We learn much, for example,
about the arduous nature of the journey and about Plano Carpinis own personal reactions to all that he sees and experiences. We are also made privy to
the journeys very real and explicitly political purpose, namely, to discern
whether or not the Great Khan intends to extend his expansionist designs
across the various regions of Western Christendom. In this connection, the
narrative as a whole aims to provide a description of the customs, practices,
laws, and political dispositions of the Mongol tribesa description, that is,
of the Mongols explicitly racial characteristics.6 And yet, in large part,
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what Plano Carpinis racial description does is simply to cast the Mongols
themselves as a kind of mirror of his own subjective concerns. Witness,
for example, the consistent fascination in this text with issues of gender
blurring and with the Mongols alleged overturning of conventional gender
hierarchies (78, 1718). These aspects of Plano Carpinis cultural description shed as much, if not more, light on the Franciscan friars own convention-bound understanding of gender roles as on the distinctive nature of the
Mongols own forms of gender and gender relations. Also noteworthy in
this respect is a chapter in the text entitled Of their [i.e., the Mongols]
Character, Good and Bad (14 18), in which the good aspects of their
character just happen to be strikingly similar to a decidedly Franciscan
understanding of good character, namely obedience, respect for community, abstinence, and charity. Their bad traits, according to Plano Carpini,
resemble, not surprisingly, the seven deadly sins.
Further evidence of the ways in which premodern ethnographic
writing does not simply deliver straightforward descriptions of cultural others can be found in what is perhaps the best-known travel text of the period,
Marco Polos Travels.7 Reading more often than not as a kind of premodern
Lets Go Asia, the narrative of Polos Travels is indeed filled with numerous
racial observations. Long passages of the text, for example, are given over to
highly detailed descriptions of rulership and community in the lands of the
Great Khan and also among the Brahmins in India. Premodern and postmodern readers alike, moreover, have often appreciated the narratives ostensibly truth-telling aspects, its apparent status, that is, as documentary record
of what life was really like in lands east of the Mediterranean in the late thirteenth century. And yet considered from other perspectives, the Travels also
clearly outstrips the generic limits of straightforward cultural description.
Consider, for example, the numerous, enthusiastically related stories in the
Travels about the sexual availability of Eastern women to Western male
travelers. More often than not, these vignettes serve to interrupt rather than
foster descriptive display through their monotonous inscription of a single
orientalist theme, Eastern female sexual availability. Moreover, the texts
explicit mention of the usefulness of such sexual information for a male
traveler between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four cannot help but
draw attention as well to the twenty-something male traveler-author himself, Marco Polo. It likewise draws attention to his relationship with his literary collaborator Rustacello da Pisa, coauthors closed off from the rest of
the world at the time of their writing, closeted, if you will, within the space
of a prison cell (3334). Descriptions of the sexualized other in the Travels
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thus also point away from the other and back to the imagined scene of textual production, namely, male literary collaborators whose enthusiastic (not
to say, heated) exchange of sexualized stories about women serves in part to
keep alive the erotically charged nature of their own homosocial relationship, despite the fact that the narrative as a whole never directly alludes to
such a putatively taboo situation.8
And yet even in light of these kinds of interpretations, Plano
Carpinis History and Polos Travels can hardly be seen as texts that wholeheartedly disturb conventional ethnographic norms. On the contrary, in
fact: geographical imaginings in both of these texts seem to function in the
service of these very norms. After all, origins and destinations in both the
History and the Travels are straightforwardly delineated: each narrative charts
the course of a Westerner who travels to particular places in the East and
then travels back home again, more or less retracing the route of the outbound trip. From whence and to where travel occurs both seem quite clear.
Polos Travels, moreover, frequently alludes to the interest other travelers will
find in all that the narrator himself sees and does, thereby highlighting the
fact that the intended audience of the Travels is none other than a group of
non-others, individuals who, like Polo himself, are at home in the West,
and hence share the same values and interests as the narrator-traveler. Similarly, judgmental comments in Plano Carpinis History e.g., the narrators
frequent remarks about the Mongols inordinant reverence for entryways
and thresholds, and also about his own intense dislike of the Mongol drink
of preference, cosmus (mares milk) clearly remind readers of the lines of
racial and cultural difference. Categories of home and not home in both
of these narratives, in other words, appear to be stable and clearly set
forth: the traveler-narrators here not only know their own desire know
what they do and what they do not like they also know where in the
space of their travels they reach the limit of their desires satisfaction. They
appear to know in all certainty, in other words, where the line of racial otherness begins.
Predictably enough, however, the geographical imaginings that we
find in Mandevilles Travels are at once very different and much more complicated. Though the Mandeville -narrator takes great care in specifying at
the outset information pertaining to his own identity and social location
I, John Maundevylle, knyght . . . that was born in Englond, in the town of
Seynt Albones . . . (3) this narrator also goes on, in the very same sentence, to highlight his status as a traveler who is constantly on the move
specifically, as someone who has passed thorghout Turkye, Ermonye the
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lityll and the grete [Armenia], thorgh Tartarye, Percye [Persia], Surrye,
Arabye, Egypt the high and the lowe, thorgh Lybye, Caldee, and a gret partie of Ethiope, thorgh Amazoyne, Inde the lasse and the more a gret partie
and thorghout many othere iles (3).9 Designating himself, thus, as someone who has literally been everywhere, the narrator also effectively casts
himself as a citizen of the world a traveler with no one fixed place of
origin thereby mystifying his own racial identity even as he inscribes it
and unsettling at the outset the generically central categories of home and
origin. And just as these categories are disturbed in Mandevilles Travels
from the start, so also is a clear-cut understanding of the journey itself. For
although there is much initial discussion of Jerusalem as the goal or endpoint of the narrators journey, as the narrative goes on to unfold, it
becomes harder and harder to recognize Jerusalem as anything more than an
alleged goal. Certainly the narrator seems to be in no special hurry to get to
this extremely important Christian region (we later learn, from his own
account, that he in fact took the longest route possible to go there, the one
that traverses the Islamic territory of Egypt), and his actual arrival in the
Holy Land, moreover, is shown to be an altogether lackluster event, receiving no sort of special textual embellishment and hardly constituting a climactic moment or high point of the narrative. Furthermore, once there, the
narrator himself seems to find less interest or pleasure in the place per se
than he does in other things, such as the activity of delineating in great
detail all the various alternative routes of travel that exist between the Holy
Land from western Europe (see 81 84). Arrival at the putative destination
is thus characterized by a turning of attention backwards to the point from
which one came. Interestingly enough, even the very end of the text does
not serve to clarify the geographical coordinates of a final destination. For in
concluding the account of his travels, the narrator simply states, And now I
am comen hom mawgree [despite] myself to reste, for gowtes, Artetykes
that me distreynen [disable], that deffynen the ende of my labour agenst my
will, God knoweth . . . thus takynge solace in my wrechched reste, recordynge the tyme passed (210). Where precisely the narrator comes to rest
remains unclear; all we know for sure at this point is that a situation of roadweariness has heralded the end of the traveling and writing process.
That the beginning and the ending of the journey in Mandevilles
Travels should be so vaguely represented is nonetheless not as surprising as
may first appear, given the fact that there is an explicit preoccupation in this
text with the business of circumnavigating the world. Two-thirds of the way
into his account the Mandeville -narrator devotes a whole chapter to this
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topic, and one remembers, of course, that it is largely due to this particular
narrative concern that Columbus himself took a copy of Mandevilles Travels on his first voyage to the New World.10 Circumnavigation, however, is
much more than merely an important theme in this text; it is also another
name for the texts structural make-up and readerly effects, highlighting as it
does the many circularities and round-about turns of the narrative itself.
Certainly the experience of reading Mandevilles Travels can be accurately
characterized as one which produces a sense of going around and around.
No sooner does the narrator approach the entry point proper to Jerusalem,
for example, than he moves into a long, ostensibly digressive discussion of
the customs, practices, and sights to be seen in Egypt, the realm controlled
by the Sultan of Babylon. The journey toward the Christian center of the
world thus takes a decidedly asymptotic turn, never quite concluding at the
place to which it ostensibly was heading. All throughout this narrative,
moreover, the experience of going to a manifestly new place tends to represent itself, paradoxically enough, as an experience of turning back once again
to an old place, a place where one has already been. The flesh-mortifying
worshippers of the Juggernaut, for example, taken ensence [incense] and
other aromatyk thinges of noble smell. and sensen the ydole as we wolde don
here Goddes preciouse body (116, my emphasis). The Juggernaut worshippers manifestly non-Christian practice of human sacrifice, moreover,
appears to have an extremely Christian outcome: after a worshipper kills
himself for love of the idol, his friends brennen [burn] the body and
thonne everych [every one] of his frendes taken a quantyte of the assches
and kepen hem in stede of [in place of ] relykes and seyn that it is holy thing
(118, my emphasis). Going to the realm of the foreign and other is thus
uncannily like returning home to Latin Christendom. The new, the
strange, and the exotic in Mandevilles Travels keep turning our attention around to that which is familiar and vice versa as well. For the familiar in this text is also shown to be part and parcel of the exotic. The
ostensibly homely territory of the Holy Land is also, in its own way, a place
that is extremely other. It is a place, after all, that is entirely strewn with
body parts the head of St. Katherine here, the finger of St. Thomas there
and hence it is a place that is very much akin to the explicitly nonChristian communities of the East where practices of bodily fragmentation
and cannibalism are everywhere apparent. No matter where one goes in
Mandevilles Travels, one always seems to travel in a circle back to the place
from which one started. The journey out, the journey away from home is
circularly linked to the journey back, the journey toward home, providing
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in this regard an excellent verbal counterpart to conventional premodern

visual representations of circumnavigation.
Circumnavigation, however, is not the only term appropriate for
characterizing the Travels thematic and structural singularities. Pleasure, I
would suggest, is indeed the other important term in this equation, since the
Mandeville text is certainly nothing less than a narrative that explicitly aims
to provide pleasure. As the narrator states at the very beginning, men covet
to hear the Holy Land spoken about and diverse countries thereabout and
[they] have of that great pleasure and enjoyment (44 ); and the narrative of
travel that the narrator goes on to give unmistakably delivers the pleasureinducing descriptions that its audience allegedly wants. One can certainly
discern, moreover, that Mandevilles Travels did indeed serve as pleasurable
reading for a wide body of the premodern literate community, given the fact
of its far-flung existence in some three hundred manuscript copies. These
facts alone, however, do not help to specify the precise kind or kinds of pleasure that the Travels might have provided both then and now to its
readership. And so the questions I would like to address in the rest of this
essay pertain precisely to this issue. What kind of pleasure did Mandevilles
text propose for its premodern readers, and how and why, of course, should
it be possible to discern something of the traces and terms of this pleasure
from the vantage point of the late twentieth century? What, in other words,
is the pleasure that is at stake for both writer and reader in a text that is at
one and the same time utterly realistic and completely fantastic? And how,
of course, might an understanding of the texts pleasure-inducing aspects
affect our understanding of its overall racial imaginary?
At the risk of effacing the specificity of each of these questions, let
me take this opportunity to advance a particular hypothesis as a means of
provoking further analysis. The pleasure that Mandevilles Travels offers, I
submit, is precisely the pleasure that derives from situations of passing.
What exactly do I mean here by the notion of passing? On the most general level, passing refers to the act of assuming a new or otherwise nonnatural identity in such a way as to suggest to outside observers that this new
identity is in no way feigned or fictional, but rather natural and true. Someone who passes is someone who plays a part so well that he or she effectively becomes the part, someone, in other words, who, Hamlet-like, renders as natural that which is merely performance. Notions of theatricality
are obviously pertinent here since passing is always a kind of spectacle, an
eminently spectacular event. Passing, that is to say, always involves the act of
witnessing, always involves the affirmation or judgment of some knowing
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audience, an audience which, in point of fact, should indeed know better,

because its knowledge and/or social positioning should enable it to see
throughi.e., discern the unnaturalness or falsity of the performance at
hand. If, for example, men successfully pass as women, or women as men, or
whites as blacks, or blacks as whites, they do so only because others witness
and believe in the truth or naturalness of their performances.
But to understand the notion of passing along the lines of theatricality and spectatorship also means contemplating further the complexities
that belong to these territories. Carole-Anne Tylers observations about passing are especially relevant in this regard: The mark of passing successfully,
Tyler writes, is the lack of a mark of passing, the lack of a signifier of some
difference from what one seems to be. Passing, therefore, can only name the
very failure of passing, an indication of a certain contradiction at its heart,
an indication of the contradictions which constitute it.11 In its specific
insistence on lack, Tylers statement highlights not only the issue of constitutive contradiction involved in all acts of passing namely, in order to
pass successfully, one needs, paradoxically, to appear to be failing to pass
at all but also the way in which acts of passing always involve the issue
of what I would call closeted difference: a difference, that is to say, that
is simultaneously there and not there, apparent but at the same time not
apparent at all, a difference that is somehow caught between the deceptiveness of mimicry and the straightforwardness of coming out, without
being simply reducible to one or the other. Underlining once again matters
of contradiction, we might say that passing is an activity that is visibly committed to the production of its own invisibility. And it is indeed this sense of
invisibility as the paradoxical partner of the very visibility of passing that
allies passing with the performative identity structure that belongs to the figure Homi Bhabha calls mimic man, the colonial subject who strives to
become the colonizer through assimilation, but who nonetheless remains, in
the eyes of the colonizer Other, not quite not white.12 The double negative of this phrase is akin to Tylers sense of lack and failure as the necessary
terms of success in passing: just as the one who passes succeeds only when
the act of passing has been understood to fail, so does the mimicry of the
colonized subject succeed only as a decidedly failed effort, simultaneously
hailing the colonized subject into place and calling her or him into question.
For Bhabha, the activity of mimic man is both constant and constantly
imperfect; it is, in short, a (su)stained imitation that leaves him necessarily
and perpetually outside of him/self and at the same time, outside of the
realm of the Other: in short, not quite not white.
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How might these observations bear on our assessment of questions

of racial representation in Mandevilles Travels ? Who exactly in this text can
we identify as engaging in the act of passing? The answer to this last question seems clear enough: just about everyone. For at first glance at least,
there seems to be not one single figure nor one single racial grouping in this
text who does not deserve to be seen according to the logic of passing.
Indeed, what is striking and distinctive in Mandevilles Travels is the way in
which racial identities are repeatedly shown to be (su)stained imitations,
performances, that is to say, which display themselves as such and hence
encourage our recognition of them as visible investments in the theatricalized modality of passing. Let us consider in this regard one of the primary
racial representations in this text, the representation of Latin Christendom.
Twentieth-century readers of the Travels, it seems, have universally accepted
the solidity of this identity category, and their ceaseless insistence on the
Travels overall Christian concerns has served to secure Christianity itself as
the texts unquestionably firm ideological foundation. And yet, what we see
when we look at the Christians represented in the Travels is that they clearly
appear as not quite not Christians. For as the Egyptian Sultan points out
to the narrator in the dead center of the book, European Christians merely
pass as Christians, and they do not do a very good job of it at that: they
transgress their own laws, they are swollen with pride and vainglory, and
their priests are poor practitioners of the faith (88 90). European Christians are shown by the Travels to be Christians in name only, not at all as
embodiments of some sort of essential Christian identity. Indeed, the rest of
the text strongly suggests that there is no such thing as essential or authentic Christian identity insofar as all sorts of others in this text can and
do indeed effectively pass as Christian. Witness, for example, the pious
half-man/half-goat that the narrator encounters in the deserts of Egypt.
And witness, of course, all of the so-called virtuous pagans in this text,
many of whom, though manifestly not Christian, strike one nonetheless as
more Christian than the so-called real Christians. These others, in other
words, are themselves, not quite not other insofar as the very mark of their
otherness is at one and the same time the mark of their non-otherness. Consider in this regard the narrators description in chapter 35 of the honor
done by a pagan son to his dead father. To be sure, the honorable practices
described here are unquestionably other, for they amount to nothing less
than cannibalism pure and simple. The son, we learn, boils his fathers head
and then distributes little bits of the boiled flesh among his special friends
in stede of entremess or a sukkarke [as the equivalent of a special dish or
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extra course] (206). And yet, this manifestly non-Christian, cannibalistic

practice also seems to be merely passing itself off as such, for it also stands
quite clearly as a dim replica and a near miss of eucharistic veneration. The
sons convening of his special friends for the purpose of engaging in a ritualized meal obviously recalls Christs Last Supper with the apostles, and the
sons practice of making a cup out of his fathers skull and then drinking
from it all the rest of his lifetime in remembrance of his fadir (206) is cast
in unmistakably eucharistic terms. Thus, as this textual vignette makes clear,
others can certainly pass as Christians just as Christians themselves, as we
have already seen, have the capacity to pass effectively as others. Neither
of these identity categories in the Travels is stable or entirely separate one
from the other. And in this respect what the text as a whole suggests is a radically nonfoundational understanding of identity: Christianity and NonChristian otherness are both shown to be precisely that which one cannot
grasp, nothing more, in short, than mere passing performances.
What, then, can be said of the narrators own identity? Though the
narrator initially introduces himself as a Christian knight, Sir John Mandeville, there is also considerable reason to regard him, in the final analysis,
as both not quite not a Christian and not quite not a knight. The Christian fervor he expresses quite amply at the very beginning of the narrative
seems at best to be of questionable sincerity, given the fact that it appears to
be entirely absent once the narrator enters the service of the Sultan of Babylon. Indeed, far from trying to persuade the Sultan to convert to Christianity, the Mandeville-narrator winds up not only detailing the distinguishing
traits of Islam at the center of his own narrative, but also explicitly agreeing
with the Sultans own harsh critique of Latin Christendom (87 92). As for
the narrators knightly behavior, that too seems to be finally little more than
mere passing performance, albeit one that the narrator accomplishes for the
most part quite effectively. He speaks amply and enthusiastically, after all,
about his having borne arms for both the Sultan of Babylon and the Great
Khan, and his knightly exhortations calling for Christian repossession of the
Holy Land are entirely believable not only in terms of his own self-styled
warrior status, but also in terms of the actual historical realities of fourteenthcentury European crusading.13
And yet the narrators own knightly self-portrayal also cannot be
taken simply at face value, for alongside of this manifestly phallic posturing
we must reckon with an equally manifest textual display of the narrators
decidedly nonphallic posturing, his reticence, that is, to engage in acts of
penetration. So much is suggested, for example, by the considerable empha156 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 31.1 / 2001

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sis given in the text to the anxiety that the narrator and his fellow travelers
display in their crossing i.e., penetrating of the Vale Perilous. It is hard
not to see this anxiety in specifically sexual terms insofar as this scene of geographical penetration is immediately followed by a reference to the perils of
heterosexual penetration: just beyond the Vale Perilous the narrator describes
a race distinguished by its women who have snakes inside their bodies that
stongen men upon hire yerdes [penises] (190). References elsewhere in the
text also allude to the dangers of heterosexuality. The story of the deathdealing love of Hippocrass daughter and the story of necrophilia that
immediately follows it (14 17 ) both represent heterosexuality as a potentially murderous and socially destructive activity. Heterosexual penetration,
in any case, does not seem to be a high priority for the Mandeville-narrator:
when offered the possibility by the Sultan of wedding a great princes
daughter, the narrator, in laconic, Bartelby-like fashion, simply declines: I
had no will to don it (21) is all that he says. The abbreviated nature of this
response, as well as the wider context in which it occurs, make it impossible
to discern its precise motivation, whether, for example, it is has to do with
a certain sexual reticence on the narrators part or with his Christian religious scruples or with both or with neither.
Nevertheless, the rejection here of miscegenation is certainly worth
insisting upon, not only because it remains so fundamentally unexplained
within the text, but also because it points, I believe, to a wider, more pervasive pattern of racial representation throughout the text. The Mandeville narrator, as we see here, could have married a princess from the Sultans retinue and thereby, presumably, could have remained forever in the service of
a lord whom he manifestly admires and enjoys serving, and yet he doesnt.
Likewise, the narrator could have established permanent residency in the
household of the Great Khan, another lord whom he greatly admires and
manifestly enjoys serving, but he doesnt do that either. Indeed, the narrative
as a whole leads us to surmise that the narrator could have stopped and
established himself permanently in any number of the places he visits. He
certainly might have done so in particular in the Christian community of
Prester John, which would have offered him at the very least an explicitly
Christian haven at the very point of his travels when he finds himself most
removed from the spaces of Latin Christendom. And yet he doesnt do this
either.
For all its critically acclaimed ideology of tolerance, all its manifest
investments in both the embracing and excusing of racial and cultural differences, Mandevilles Travels presents itself as a narrative in which the narLomperis / Medieval Travel Writing and Race 157

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rator consistently foregoes the opportunity to relinquish his own identity so

as to go native, something which would seem logical for him to do, after
all, given the level of attachment and admiration that he displays for a number of the racial others that he visits. What is apparent is that the narrators
desire is not for permanence and stability, but rather for impermanence and
instability. His pleasure seems to come not from situations of fixed identity
and stable residency, but rather from situations of passing and indeed, from
situations of passing through: from situations, in other words, of never
remaining in any one place or in any one racial identity for very long.
There are several possible ways of apprehending the stakes of these
kinds of representations of race, identity, and pleasure in Mandevilles Travels. To begin, let us look again at one of the defining features of the phenomenon of passing, the sense that passing always occupies some sort of
middle ground between deceptive mimicry and straightforward coming out.
Passing in this regard becomes a way of representing closeted pleasure, pleasure which never achieves any sort of literal expression, but which instead
casts a shadow and leaves legible traces. The term closet, I believe, is especially useful in a critical analysis of Mandevilles Travels, which is a text that
not only displays considerable fascination with spaces of privacy and intimacy, but also gives way to numerous hints of homoerotism. In this connection, let us note the way in which the text is structured not so much as a
linear journey but more so as a sequential display of the narrators zealous
and indeed quite intimate relationship with three powerful men: the Sultan
of Babylon, the Great Khan, and Prester John.
The relationship that the narrator maintains with each of these figures clearly plays out the textbook definition of homosocial insofar as each
relationship is characterized by attachments that are at once same-sex based,
powerfully strong, and manifestly nonsexual. But precisely in their very
status as textbook homosociality, these relationships also display their place
on a continuum with the homoerotic. Witness, for example, the scene
described in chapter 16 where the narrator and the Sultan adjourn to the
latters bedroom for a private chat. Although this bedroom conversation
contains no explicit sexual content, it nonetheless takes place in circumstances that cannot entirely be divorced from sexual, bodily considerations.
For what we see in this episode with the Sultan, and also in the subsequent
episodes with the Great Khan and with Prester John, are situations of bodily
confusions. For in all three of these instances, not only does the narrator
himself pass as a member of the other race (in the Prester John episode, for
example, the narrrator writes himself covertly into the priests own family
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history), but so do all the racial others themselves also pass as members of
the race of Christians. The Sultan of Babylon, the narrator tells us after the
bedroom chat, speaks more knowledgeably about Christianity than any
real Christian ever could; he is, as it were, more Christian than the Christians are. The Great Khan is shown to be a devout, Christ-like figure, someone who not only speaks in parables before he dies (i.e., the parable of the
arrow breaking that he delivers to his sons), but also someone who turns out
to be the progenitor of a race of Mongol Christians (!). Priest-like, though
decidedly not part of Latin Christendom and related by marriage to this
race of Mongol Christians, Prester John is shown by the narrator to be the
practitioner of a certain non-Roman Catholic form of no-frills Christianity: he regularly carries with him, we are told, but o cros of tree [only a
cross of wood] withouten peynture and withouten gold or silver or precious
stones in remembrance that Ihesu Crist suffred deth upon a cros of tree
(182 83). In all three scenes, in other words, bodies of Christians and bodies of non-Christians are intimately fused and con/fused. In each, we might
say, the narrators male Christian body literally and quite unmistakeably
sexually, I would add passes into the body of a male non-Christian
other, thereby making visible on a structural level what remains closeted
and indeed unspoken on the narratives literal level. Passing in these instances
thus becomes both vehicle and accomplishment of the pleasures of male
homoerotism, thereby establishing Mandevilles Travels as a significant,
albeit closeted, representation of the premodern homoerotic imaginary.14
It would be inaccurate, though, to equate these hints of male
homoeroticism in the Travels with some kind of wider textual investment in
animosity toward women in general or femininity per se. Whatever animosity toward women there may be in this text seems to amount neither to
wholesale gynophobia nor to misogyny pure and simple; rather, it seems to
me to be a byproduct, as it were, of the various negative representations of
heterosexuality included in this text. As we have already had occasion to see,
heterosexuality in the Travels is often cast in the mode of violence or danger, and the harm that these modes imply does not simply accrue to men.
Women too potentially suffer under heterosexuality, as witnessed by the
Mandeville -narrators repeated mention of the practice in certain races of
burying a wife who is still alive with her already-dead husband. Heterosexuality in these instances can only be seen as a kind of living death. What,
then, are we to make of the narrators description of the Amazons in chapter 18? By definition, of course, Amazons are womens women and as the
Mandeville -narrator describes them, they certainly appear to be no more
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unusual and no more noteworthy than any of the other others the narrator encounters in the course of his travels. Not at all, that is to say, does the
narrator stigmatize them or suggest that they are somehow worthy of censure simply because they are women. Far from it, in fact, for in one important respect the narrator and the Amazons, ironically enough, appear to
resemble each other: both are consummate figures of passing. Not surprisingly
the text of the Travels delineates the Amazons as women who successfully
pass as men, which corresponds remarkably to premodern lesbian identities.
So striking, in fact, is this description of the Amazons as women who play
the part of men that one cannot also help but wonder: might the Mandevillenarrator himself have been just one such figure, a woman who has successfully passed as a world traveler, a man about town, a Man de ville?
This is certainly worth thinking about, it seems to me, given the fact that
display of authorial identity in many premodern texts often engages word
play of one sort or another, and also given the fact that the precise historical identity of Sir John Mandeville remains to this very day a mystery.
The second way we might think about questions of passing in this
text is by using it as a way of talking about the texts overall preoccupation
with matters of identity. To recognize Mandevilles Travels as a text that
points to questions of the fluidity and instability of identity constructs is, in
one sense, not especially surprising; many other premodern texts demonstrate similar preoccupations. But in the Travels the urgency surrounding
these matters seems to be greater than what we find elsewhere. Throughout
the text there are numerous calls sent out both for the mobilization of old
identities and the reconstruction of new identities; the order of the day in
the Travels seems to be the sociopolitical need for identity resignification.
Time and again the text refers to the fact that Christians need to become
something else, either better Christians or a different kind of Christian, so
that they can successfully undertake the repossession of the Holy Land. And
the text also constantly shows us, in the form of the virtuous pagans, possible evolutions (or devolutions) in Christian identity, that is to say, new forms
of Christian identification and new forms of Christian self-understanding.
And insofar as there is no simple or essential Christian identity displayed in
the entire narrative, Mandevilles Travels can be said to amplify and set in
relief, through its insistence on questions of passing, something of the
actual fluctuations of identity at work in the premodern world system. For
as Janet Abu-Lughod has observed, the fourteenth century is precisely a
moment in history when the interlocking economic systems of the world
were engaged in transitional processes that would issue eventually in Euro160 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 31.1 / 2001

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pean hegemony. Prior to this, as Abu-Lughod argues, there existed no specific or fixed geopolitical space known as Europe, and hence there also
existed no fixed sense of European cultural or social identity.15 Europe and
European Christianity in the fourteenth century were in the midst of a
period of flux and were themselves only beginning to take on the identity
configurations that they would assume in the next, early modern phase of
the world system. Mandevilles Travels with its manifest investments in acts
of passing through various different racial identity configurations, can be
said therefore to bear witness to all this, and indeed can be said as well to
participate in these sorts of historical repositionings.
A third and final way we might understand questions of passing in
the Travels is in terms of what they tell us about the texts status as a kind of
Christian, colonialist fantasy. For as Mandevilles Travels as a whole demonstrates, all the world is quite literally a stage for Christianity, insofar as
everyone in this text seemingly has the potential to pass as a Christian. It is
especially notable in this regard that figures of political power i.e., the
Brahmins in India, the Great Khan, and the Sultan of Babylon are precisely those figures who pass most effectively and most prominently as
Christians. In this respect, the Travels can be said to encode a kind of wishful political scenario whereby Christians and Christianity are shown to be
dominant throughout the world, this being, of course, nothing more than
a purely wishful and indeed willful representation, given the fact that it runs
counter to world history such as we know it in the late fourteenth century.
At that time, Islam, not Christianity, held sway throughout the world,
including in its fold not only peoples who inhabited the spaces surrounding
the Mediterranean (especially the Middle East and Spain), but also numerous tribal communities all across Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, racial
groupings (some very powerful, e.g., the empire of Mali) that had progressively become converts to Islam over the course of the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries.16 Furthermore, not only did the Mongols, who conquered Islamic territories in the Middle East in the mid thirteenth century,
wind up themselves converting to Islam and not to Chrisitanity (during the
reign of the Il-Khans), but also once Christian Jerusalem fell under Moslem
control in 1291, Latin Christendom never effectively recouped its losses,
never again constituted itself as a significant power base in that entire region
of the world. Thus, the reference in the Travels to the lineage of the Great
Khan and this peoples eventual conversion to Christianity must be understood as nothing less than pure fantasy. The text of Mandevilles Travels,
however, with the sense that it conveys of a world entirely filled with ChrisLomperis / Medieval Travel Writing and Race 161

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tians and others wishing to be Christian, can be understood as a significant

testament to the power and longevity of this fantasy within the imagination
of Latin Christendom.
Not everyone residing within this religious setting, however, must
have shared this fantasy and certainly not everyone in the premodern world
can be said to be included in it. To state that every race represented in Mandevilles Travels can and does pass as Christian would not be entirely accurate, for the Jews represented in this text clearly do not. They are indeed the
only racial grouping in the narrative that does not pass at all, that only
remains itself, and they are also the only racial grouping that the narrator
himself consistently passes judgment on, consistently passing the Jews into
the realm of the hated and the reviled, the realm, that is, of the absolute
other. In this respect, then, Jews that appear in this text remain as they did
in point of fact in fourteenth-century Latin Christendom, the one race that
was not readily or actively repurchased into the Christian racial fold. Mandevilles Travels can thus be said to stand as one more demonstration of the
way in which European Christian identity tried to establish its own coherence and stability largely at the expense of the Jews, who are relegated to a
position of social marginality, contained and sustained in a fantasmatic
identity construct determined by the binary opposition between Christians
and Jews. There is indeed a strong desire encoded in this text to keep the
Jews entirely separate from all other racial groupings, as witnessed by the
narrators inclusion of the story of the Jews of the Ten Lost Tribes, Gog and
Magog, who are entirely held at bay from the rest of the world in the
impenetrable hills beyond the land of Cathay (cf. chap. 30).
In neglecting to point out the way in which Jews are the only race
in the Travels that seems to be wholly barred from passing as Christians, we
as critics fail to recognize the complicity of our own critical gestures in the
very passing acts that we identify: for in making critical judgments as to
which identities, which races, or which sexualities do or do not pass in this
or in any text, we inevitably instantiate a politics of critical vision, providing
a kind of intellectual window, as it were, through which some identities will
pass and will be seen while others will remain occluded and entirely passed
over. Certainly Mandevilles Travels, with all of its many preoccupations
with passing, is a text that finally demands that we as readers be conscious of
our own position and agency within this kind of representational theatricality.17 Our stance as readers necessarily becomes more of an ethical position,
one which carries with it the responsibility of recognizing the significant
part that we play in constructing identities, passing through some, passing
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over others, and passing yet others into realms of significance that are themselves endowed with more or less sociopolitical agency.18 From this recognition, it seems to me, emerges the strong tendency to stop seeing Mandeville and the society that produced him as entities that are purely and
simply Christian (or purely and simply male or purely and simply
European), and to undertake instead an investigation into how the
homogenizing category purely and simply X got produced in the first
place. To do any less would be, on the one hand, to deny the prevalence of
the not quite not . . . structure of identity throughout this text, and on the
other hand, to ignore questions of historical violence that are always at stake
in matters having to do with any kind of clear-cut identity production.19

a
Notes
1

4
5
6

For accounts of medieval European contact with, and representation of,

non-Europeans, see Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (London: Sheed and Ward,
1955); Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel
Writing, 400 1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Iain Macleod
Higgins, Writing East: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997 ). J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European
Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250 1350 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), also make some relevant observations about these matters, especially in relation
to The Travels of Marco Polo.
In this regard, see especially Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John
Mandeville (New York: Modern Language Association, 1954); and Rudolph
Wittkower, Marvels of the East and Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the
Marvels of the East, reprinted in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (1977; repr.
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987 ), 45 74, 7592.
See James Clifford, Introduction: Partial Truths, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1986 ), 1 26, quotation at 9.
Ibid., 14, 10, and 15 respectively.
A translation is reprinted in Dawson, Mission to Asia, 3 72.
Here I am drawing on Robert Bartletts understanding of the definition of race in a
premodern context: uncoupling the notion of race from its modern and
postmodern associations with skin color, Bartlett defines race in the Middle Ages in
terms of the customs, language, and laws of a particular social grouping, these
being, according to Bartlett, the primary badges of ethnicity. See The Making of
Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 9501350 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), 197 242.
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7
8

9
10

11
12
13
14

15
16
17
18
19

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The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958),
cited hereafter in the text.
My remarks here are indebted to Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of
Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989), who has argued that all acts
of literary collaboration involve a sublimation of erotic entanglement. . . . [A] writer
turns to a partner not from a practical assessment of advantages, but from a
superstitious hope, a longing for replenishment and union that invites baroquely
sexual interpretation (4 ). These comments, to my mind, offer a suggestive vantage
point from which to reassess the Marco PoloRustacello da Pisa collaboration, an
authorial alliance that scholars usually do not analyze. A more comprehensive
interpretive queering of the Travels as a whole, though interesting to contemplate,
lies beyond the scope of this study.
All citations are to Mandevilles Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, vol. 1, EETS o.s. 153
(London: Oxford University Press, 1919); this is the Cotton text.
Valerie I. J. Flint surveys the place of Mandeville in Columbuss enterprise, in The
Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992), 99 104, 141 42, 170 80.
See Carole-Anne Tyler, Passing: Narcissism, Identity, and Difference, differences 6
(1994 ): 212 48, quotation at 21516.
Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,
October 28 (1984 ): 125 33, at 131.
For the crusading mentality in England, see J. J. N. Palmer, England, France, and
Christendom, 13771399 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 18191.
A number of scholars have addressed the possibilities and limits of homosocial
relations: see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980); Christopher Baswell, Men in the Roman dEneas:
The Construction of Empire, in Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare A. Lees
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 148 68; and several of the
essays collected in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero
(New York: Routledge, 1996 ).
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 352 73.
See the general accounts of Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe; and
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony.
See, in this connection, Tylers argument that audiences always enact the passing of
the others identities (Passing, 239 42).
See Syed Manzurul Islam,The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996 ).
See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York:
Routledge, 1993).

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