in hell, limiting the saved to those patriarchs awaiting the Savior alone and salvation to pre-Resurrection times alone, a position later adopted by the church.76 In the sixth century, Gregory the Great became famous for the saying, “nec fides habet meritum, cui humana ratio praebet experimentum” (faith for which human reason gives proof has no merit), so apparently denying the value of philosophy for salvation.77
Twelfth- and thirteenth-century thinkers evinced a renewed interest in the matter of the salvation of virtuous non-Christians, particularly of pagan philosophers themselves revived by the reflowering of classical interest known as the “renaissance of the twelfth century.” Twelfth- and thirteenth-century thought on the question was split into two camps. The majority of thinkers, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Alain of Lille, occupied the more conservative “sola fides” position, which held that faith alone, and not reason or philosophical understanding, was sufficient for salvation.78 But an influential minority, best represented by Peter Abelard in the twelfth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, occupied a far more liberal position on the question of salvation. Abelard argued, for instance, that reason was that which made man comparable to God’s image, and should be used to investigate God, although post–Lex Christi, it was not enough.79 Aquinas opened the way to non-Christian salvation much further, arguing that even after the Incarnation and Lex Christi, faith was available to men without the benefit of Christian teaching: the first principles of Christian faith were implanted in men by God, who made faith available to the virtuous through direct revelation. These latter prepared to receive his grace simply by—according to what would become the resounding formula of fourteenth-century thought on the issue—facere quod in se est (doing what was in them).80 Virtuous pagans, according to Aquinas’s formulation, need not do anything other than what was already in them in order for their virtue to be recognized by God and to be thus granted salvation. Conversion was unnecessary; virtue could reside naturally in God’s people, without recourse or access to revealed law. Neither was this view treated as peripheral or heterodox: the main commentators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Duns Scotus, Durandus, Denis the Carthusian, Thomas of Strasbourg—all accepted the formulation without any alteration.81 The implications of Aquinas’s formulation—which amounts to a theorized acceptance of the other and a questioning of the distinctiveness of the Latin Christian self’s relation to God—are profound for the fourteenth century’s theorizations of what defined Christians against non-Christians, and are decisive, I show, in the striking approaches to non-Christians displayed in Mandeville’s Travels.
As this brief survey suggests, the late medieval period was a robust one for the development of anthropological ideas that would continue well past the Middle Ages proper. While these ideas are meant to provide background to the ethnographic practice and writing of the chapters that follow, what will also emerge in those chapters is the gap between such theory and actual practice once a writer is faced with framing a particular ethnographic encounter. Thus Gerald of Wales aggressively applies classical developmental anthropology to the Welsh and Irish, but unexpectedly applies another, discordant discourse in a kind of resistant dialogue with developmental ideas. William of Rubruck goes out of his way not to apply ideas of inhumanity or incivility available to him in his day to the Mongols to whom he would preach. Joinville applies developmental anthropology to describe the incivility of nomadic Bedouins and Mongols, but when he comes to his main ethnographic focus, the Muslims of the Levant and the Holy Land, his desire for dialogue with them moves him toward new and unscripted terrain. Finally, Mandeville’s text not only applies virtuous pagan theory to the Brahmins and others but exposes the crisis implicit in the challenge posed by non-Christian salvation to the exclusivity, distinctiveness, and integrity of the Christian community in the fourteenth century. Each of these writers, moreover, wrote ethnography in a particular way, and in the chapters that follow, the dialogic form of their medieval ethnographies will be as much the focus of discussion as is their content.
CHAPTER 2
Subjective Beginnings
Autoethnography and the Partial Gazes of Gerald of Wales
The earliest ethnography of Europe emerged from its borders, particularly as they underwent expansion in the twelfth century. Representative texts of such “border ethnography” include Adam of Bremen’s account of Baltic peoples, and his continuator Helmold’s description of Slavic customs, as well as a proliferation of texts about Britain’s natives, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots, viewed by Anglo-Normans coming into contact with them along Britain’s Celtic periphery. Gerald of Wales stands as the most important of these ethnographic border writers of the Celtic periphery, and among the most important ethnographers of the medieval period.
Gerald wrote his four Celtic works in the span of less than a decade, from the Topographia Hibernica (The topography of Ireland) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (The conquest of Ireland) in 1188 to the Itinerarium Kambriae (The journey through Wales) in 1191, to the Descriptio Kambriae (The description of Wales) in 1194. While Gerald called these his “minor works,” and felt the need to defend his choice to expend “the flowers of my rhetoric” on “those rugged countries, Ireland, Wales and Britain,”1 his Celtic works have in fact attracted more scholarly attention than any of his other writings. The Journey through Wales and the Topography of Ireland, in particular, have been the subject of numerous recent scholarly treatments, many of them interested in Gerald’s construction of medieval Welsh and Irish identity and ethnicity at a time of pressing Anglo-Norman colonial incursion into the Celtic periphery.
But it is with the Descriptio Kambriae that Gerald managed the striking feat of reviving the classical genre of ethnography, a work devoted centrally in theme to the description of the life and customs of a single people, for the medieval period. Gerald begins his Description of Wales much as he did his earlier Celtic treatise, the Topographia Hibernica, with a physical description of the contours of the land, a move traceable within British historiographical tradition as far back as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and, of course, earlier still within Gerald’s classical sources like Caesar’s Gallic War. What comes next is far more innovative: in chapter 8 of book 1 of the Descriptio, Gerald turns his attention to the “natura, moribus, et cultu”—or nature, manners, and customs—of the Welsh people, and sustains that focus on Welsh manners and customs for the remainder of his treatise.2 Writing without direct access to the major works of classical ethnography and anthropology such as Herodotus’s Histories, Tacitus’s Germania (also known as On the Origin, Location, Customs and Peoples of the Germans) (c. a.d. 98) or Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Gerald nevertheless manages to reproduce in the Descriptio a form of writing not seen in the West for over a thousand years, the ethnographic monograph.3
We can tell Gerald thought that he was doing something new from his strain, also visible in the report of William of Rubruck, for adequate words to describe his task. In attempting to define his relation to his project and to the Welsh, Gerald works by way of metaphor. In the introduction to book 2 of the Descriptio, he likens himself to a historian, noting that he writes the Descriptio “more historico” (in the manner of a historian), a key methodological passage to which I will turn at the end of the chapter. And in the “First Preface” as well as again in the introduction to book 2, Gerald likens himself to a master pictor or painter, turning to the visual arts to capture the relation between himself and his object. In titling his work a “descriptio,” Gerald is, of course, already invoking the visual arts. Indeed, the Descriptio Kambriae forms part of the rise in visual empiricism generally in the twelfth century. Evidence for such a “visual turn” has been found particularly in the cultural production of twelfth-century Anglo-Normans, including the Normans’ use of visual evidence as “witness” to hereditary claims to land; the writing of social and natural histories supported by eyewitnessing claims; the proliferation of new genres of observation such as topographies of castles, towns, and cities, and descriptions
