worth stressing that Eurocentric attitudes are not eternal but have a history. Even such an authority as Anthony Pagden can sketch a straightforward line of European sense of technological superiority from Herodotus through medieval crusaders and missionaries to Vespucci, stating that “[a]fter Columbus’s discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope … the European belief in the capacity of European science to dominate the world became even more assertive.”62 Such linearity is simply not justified.
During the period c. 1245 to c. 1510, then, “Christendom” endured but was ailing, and “Europe” existed but was yet to be fully asserted. In the late medieval period the concept of Europe, as a region united not only by papal lordship and adherence to the Roman rite but also by a sense of ethnic and cultural unity, was gaining momentum as a replacement for the Christendom of the high Middle Ages but in relatively undeveloped form. Without a universal feeling of European cultural superiority, and without the sense of racial unity that later theories would endow—such as Blumenbach’s linking of European peoples under the banner of “Caucasian”63—the idea of Europe was not in the forefront of authors’ minds when penning their accounts of distant Easts. As a result, the motivation to portray Asian peoples as Other to the European Self was not a pervasive theme.
Curiosity, Wonder, and the Desire for Knowledge
Medieval travelers’ responses to distant Orients were multifaceted. One cannot identify a single or dominant impulse guiding their texts or indeed the expectations of their audiences. One was the desire for hard information about peoples and places. This prevailed particularly in descriptions of Mongols, as the patrons of diplomatic travelers needed intelligence dossiers to help combat that new foe and consider options for alliances. Many of the missionary travelers also sought to provide their superiors with data on local populations and the friars’ successes with conversions. A further explanation may be proposed for late medieval interest in travel writing that applies particularly to works that were not produced to satisfy any obvious and immediate need and yet became the most widely reproduced. That is, readers of these books were seeking answers to big questions confronting them and their time. How does one live in a city? What should we eat? How should we dress? How should we talk? How should we conduct our sexual lives? What constitutes ideal femininity and masculinity? What is courtliness? What kinds of luxury should be admired? What is beautiful? In short, what should we be? How should we live?
In late medieval Europe the “primarily agrarian, feudal, and monastic”64 characteristics of early and high medieval Europe were gradually giving way to a more urbanized and mercantile society with growing interest in political theory and a splendid court culture. Fashion was emerging among the aristocratic elite, who also began to enjoy increasingly luxurious households and personal etiquette. Domestic and urban rituals were employed for the staging of power as a form of theater. At the same time the cataclysms of famine, plague, and warfare plunged European people into frequent periods of instability and hardship. Long detailed works like that of Marco Polo were popular partly because they dealt with so many topics that were of interest in a changing Europe: how to exchange currency, how to send information, how to enjoy life, how to govern well, how to organize a city, how to ensure food supply. The Divisament presents the idealized figure of Khubilai Khân as a model of benevolent governance and lauds his great palaces, fine dining, courtly entertainments, festivities, and hunting expeditions as exemplary of noble life.65 Such topics were of increasing interest among European nobility, gentry, and, in certain regions, mercantile elites.
Recent scholarship on curiosity and wonder in late medieval and early modern Europe can help frame our discussion of readers’ desires. “Curiosity” might be defined as an essentially intellectual or cognitive impulse to seek causes of phenomena and thus expand the range of human understanding, while “wonder” is a primarily affective response to the mysteries and diversity of God’s creation. Many historians have asserted that curiosity was considered a vice in the Middle Ages and came to be appreciated as a path to new knowledge only during the course of the early modern period.66 Peter Harrison, for example, has argued that patristic authorities, citing the Genesis narrative on the Creation and Fall, identified curiosity as an impulse that was useless at best and at worst could lead to greater sins of pride, vanity, or a desire to be akin to God. In Augustine’s view it was a trait characteristic of pagans, heretics, and necromancers, a form of concupiscence that was to be condemned as it corrupted the mind rather than the body. Such views, says Harrison, endured in clerical discourse down to the Renaissance era and were overturned in the seventeenth century, paving the way for modern scientific thought.67
However, Edward Peters offers a more complicated overview, noting that while curiositas was viewed warily by many Christian authors who remarked on its capacity to augment the vices, its connection with travel and gaining knowledge of the world through personal experience or study was by no means incompatible with the Christian ethos. To be a Christian was indeed to be a traveler, a pilgrim: “the actual existence of the Christian was a peregrinatio, the existence of a stranger in a strange land. … Christians were to consider themselves viators in peregrinatione, homines viatores.”68 Pilgrims, kings, and indeed all Christians had reason to be curious about the world that God had created, and with the broadening of European mental horizons following the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century their version of “holy curiosity” took in a vastly expanded geography. Citing Friar Pipino’s pious preface to Marco Polo’s Divisament, Peters asserts, “If the variety of the world, its ‘secrets’ in this sense, existed to demonstrate to man the power of his Creator, then failure to encounter that variety might be considered a failure in religious duty.”69 Richard Newhauser also argues for a more finessed understanding of vitium curiositatis, emphasizing that it should be thought of as excessive curiosity and considered in relation to the specific concerns of moral thinkers such as the perceived secularization of theological studies and teaching and exaggerated care for worldly matters. Not every medieval mention of curiositas, he points out, should be read as indication of vitium curiositatis. Seriously seeking knowledge was not sinful.70
Wonder is an impulse or response with less investment in the goal of reaching understanding of phenomena through cognitive processes than is implied by curiosity. It is a condition of fascination, of hunger for what is outside oneself, which may or may not lead to comprehension.71 Wonder—admiratio—had a respectability in medieval theological thought that the vitium curiositatis was frequently seen to lack as it avoided dangers of intellectual pride and the wish to approach an omniscience properly pertaining only to God. Some things, it was thought, reached beyond “ability to comprehend and explain; and such marvels as werewolves, hybrids, and miracles, for all their tortured reflections, remained the object of admiration and amazement and wonder rather than simply of appropriation and analysis and generalization.”72 The medieval sense of wonder is impossible to reduce to a single definition, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s article on the subject demonstrates, but was an emotive and intellectual response to unfamiliar or extraordinary phenomena that could manifest as awe, pleasure, dread, or horror.73
The worlds and peoples described in some medieval travel writing were inspired by a wonder impulse, where the representation of the marvelous, including much that does not look strange to modern eyes, is enough in itself, inspiring pleasure, awe, disgust, or other affective responses. The accounts found in other travel writing, or the responses by other readers, were guided by the desire to learn of distant worlds and peoples: that is, they were guided by serious curiosity. Yet in many works the two impulses seem to be blended. New knowledge was sought to satisfy a range of needs. Some were pragmatic—strategic, military, or mercantile. Carpini’s Historia and Pegolotti’s manual for merchants, for example, served essentially practical aims. Other works, such as the epistles of John of Monte Corvino and the other early Franciscan missionaries to China, served a combination of spiritual and pragmatic ambitions, offering their readers encouraging views of evangelical prospects in the East. We have seen that Roger Bacon explicitly justified the importance of geographical knowledge on evangelical and
