Man is the Pasture of Being 3: Mandeville in Tibet, at long last

Mandeville, 1481 printing, Augsberg

by KARL STEEL

Hi everyone! I'm trying to trick you into reading this whole thing with this jaunty opening.

My interest in Sky Burial and the European Middle Ages can be traced, exactly, to this July 13th tweet. Since then, I've become, I think, the world's leading expert in the medieval Evilmerodach tradition (it didn't take more than 3 days) and written somewhere close to 11,000 words on the topic (EDIT: I am at the very least tied with one other scholar, Lisa Fagin Davis of the Medieval Academy of America, whose La Chronique Anonyme Universelle: Reading and Writing History in Fifteenth-Century France gives Evilmerodach some 10 pages, more, I believe, than he's received anywhere else). I'm also making Sky Burial the center of one of my talks during my week as a visiting medieval scholar at UCLA in early February: trust me, I'll get it down to 5000 words for you, by then.

The posts are as follows:

• Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 1: Evilmerodach
• Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 2: Sky Burial, Mostly Persian
• Man is the Pasture of Being: Interlude on the Old Man Himself

The following post, which should be savored (or avoided?), comprises three parts, which you might read sequentially, or which you might take à la carte: part 1 is a brief review of medieval European burial habits, and more on the knowledge of sky burial in the West; part 2, on Mandeville's texts on sky burial, and their patterns of illustration; part 3, where I finally do some interpretation, some of it speculative, and some of it wrestling with contemporary art also interested in the practice. It's where I get ecocritical. Hip folks might skip to the end.

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

I. Burial Habits and Foreign Customs: Esca Vermibus meets Esca Avibus

St. Gall, Cod. Fab. XVI f. 101v

Medieval aesthetics keep coming back. Gothic lines and gothic semicircles can be found anywhere anyone in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries had too much money and a more than a bit of mania (at Wave Hill, for example); they’re anywhere any university ever hankered for what they believe to be respectable antiquity (or perhaps not so respectable); I’ve watched fireworks, with other medievalists, from a Brooklyn building blessed with a Romanesque façade and lobby. But none of these buildings that I know of includes its own transi tomb; no industrialist, no moneyed aesthete – none I know of, anyway – had themselves, or their prospective tenants, represented in full size (if not “life size”) sculptures in the process of becoming esca vermibus (food for worms).

Here, then, is one of the sharpest cultural differences between the Middle Ages and now: they were fascinated with human putrefaction, and we are not. The villains of our big-budget films often meet their ends, not through a gut-devouring disease, but by tumbling off something tall. To this, we can compare the legendary death of the heretic Arius, whose guts slid out as he sat on a toilet; the sinus cavities of Vespasian, swarming with his namesake wasps; Guinevere’s ghost, crawling inside and out with vermin (105-23); the many corpses of Sir Amadace; the beloved body of The Squire of Low Degree, which, though embalmed, and though the wrong body, is still worn to dust by the kisses of an insatiable princess (929-32).

For all this, for the medievals, the exposure of human corpses to the appetites of larger animals was generally considered a horror: an accident of war, a deliberate humiliation, an erasure of the memory of the deceased. Unless something went wrong, the transformation of body to dust was subterranean work, something done out of sight. Some of you will remember the ninth-century program of establishing funerary chapels to ensure paupers had decent burials; or a forged cartulary from the same period that requires the “humane inhumation” (“humanitatis causa humaverit”) of the indigent, “so that they are not polluted by pigs, nor torn by beasts or dogs” [ut neque a porcis inquinetur nec a bestiis seu canibus laceretur; PL 97: 749b-c]. Thomas of Kent tells of how Alexander the Great, before burying the assassinated Darius, took the extra step of burning Darius’s viscera, to keep pigs from eating them, while Thomas of Cantimpré’s exempla collection (The Book of Bees) recounts why this wasn’t over-cautious: there, invisible, grunting pigs invaded a monastery, broke into the sepulcher of a wicked man, and scattered his guts about the cloister.

Amid this focus on inhumation of still fleshy (if sometimes disemboweled) corpses, other funerary methods were known in Europe and parts immediately adjacent, if only faintly. Classical texts are very well aware that many Central Asians – Zoroastrians, the peoples living around the Caspian Sea (Scythians, Bactrians, Hyrcanians, Massagetae, &c) – exposed corpses, or even the not-quite-dead, to be eaten by dogs and birds. The practice was sufficiently well-known for Diogenes the Cynic to turn it into a joke (It is reported that Diogenes said that if dogs tore apart his body, he would have a Hyrcanian funeral; if Vultures, Iberian; Diogenem dixisse testatur, si canes cadaver suum dilacerarent, Hyrcanam fore sepulturam; si vultures Iberam).

A small group of early Christian works recorded this fact too, though most of this material was just as lost to the Middle Ages as the classical texts themselves. With some help, I’ve turned up a few more texts since I last posted here: Theodoret of Cyrus’ A Cure for Pagan Maladies (9.33), smugly content that Persian converts to Christianity now bury the dead; Procopius’ The Persian Wars (I.xii.3-5), in which a Georgian Christian king switches his allegiance to the Byzantines when commanded by the Persians to follow their funeral customs; the martyrdom of Saint “not the Cornish one” Ia, her corpse left to be eaten by birds, not to scorn it, but because this is what Persians do (Latin here, at 11); and especially Agathius’s sixth-century Histories (Latin translation in footnotes here and here), which, though disapproving, still tells a story of several Byzantines (of course called “Romans”) who come across an exposed corpse in territory newly captured from the Persians. Piously, they bury it, and then at night, they endure a dream vision of an old, dignified man, garbed and bearded like a philosopher, who rebukes them for stuffing a corpse into Mother Earth. In the morning they find the corpse lying atop the grave, evicted by the insulted soil. My hunch, however, is that none of this was known to Latin Christendom, nor would the Latins have cared much about the issue, given their wonted distance from Persia. And with the Muslim conquests that followed not long after Agathius’ writing, burial practices through Mesopotamia would have seen radical changes.

Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, the key source (if not the choke point) for most medieval ethnographic and geographic musings, drew its material on Central Asia from Solinus, which records the superb camels of the Bactrians, the anthropophagy of the Scythians, and the fire-worshipping of the Zoroastrians, but nothing about exposing the dead. Jerome’s Against Jovinian was well-known to the Middle Ages (as it is to Chaucer scholars) primarily as a vector of misogynist contagion, while its ethnography would be repurposed much more rarely: in a (pseudo?) Chrysostomic sermon adapted by Paul the Deacon (PL 95:1542D-1543A), and then, much later, copied into the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais, a work of no small popularity. That may be it, however, for Jerome’s material on cultural variation.

The Latin Middle Ages would have to wait until the late thirteenth century, and especially the fourteenth, for the deliberate, funerary exposure of the dead once again to become a cultural thing. This required, first, the emergence of Jacopo de Cessolis’s hugely popular political allegory on chess, which made Evilmerodach a star by featuring him as its exemplary bad king. No longer relegated to being just a bizarre Babylonian footnote, Evilmerodach parlayed his newfound fame into a staff position with the Speculum humanae salvationis¸ few of which could be complete without its own illustration of Evilmerodach dismembering Nebuchadnezzar’s corpse and feeding it to birds. This was not exactly sky burial: Evilmerodach did this not to honor his father but to ensure this former king, who had already come back once before, stayed dead.

Mandeville, 1499 printing, Strasbourg

II. Tibetan Sky Burial Finally Comes to Europe: Franciscan Missionaries, and the Many Mandevilles

Into this fertile soil fell Odoric of Pordenone’s account of his time spent (1320s) in, or near, Tibet, during his return from his missionary trip to China. This friar heard of, or witnessed, a Tibetan funeral method in which, if a man’s father dies, he summons his relations and the clergy and:

carry the body into the country with great rejoicings. And they have a great table in readiness, upon which the priests cut off the head, and then this is presented to the son. And the son and all the company raise a chant and make many prayers for the dead. Then the priests cut the whole of the body to pieces, and when they have done so they go up again to the city with the whole company, praying for him as they go. After this the eagles and vultures come down from the mountains and every one takes his morsel and carries it away. Then all the company shout aloud, saying, 'Behold! the Man is a saint! For the angels of God come and carry him to Paradise.' And in this way the son deems himself to be honoured in no small degree, seeing that his father is borne off in this creditable manner by the angels. And so he takes his father's head, and straightway cooks it and eats it; and of the skull he maketh a goblet, from which he and all the family always drink devoutly to the memory of the deceased father. And they say that by acting in this way they show their great respect for their father. And many other preposterous and abominable customs have they.

Earlier accounts of Tibetan funerary rituals were already available, in the thirteenth-century missionary ethnographies and travel accounts of the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini and, later, William of Rubruck. Neither writer includes the birds, however; for them, the anthropophagy is the sole responsibility of the family of the deceased. And, as William of Rubruck observes, the Tibetans have abandoned the practice, “for it made them detestable in the eyes of all men” (143). Both works enjoyed a little popularity: fourteen manuscripts, comprising two versions, survive from John of Plano Carpini, and only five of William’s, all produced in England (58).

By contrast, Odoric’s travels enjoyed an astounding success: more than 117 manuscripts survive, with translations into French, German, Italian, and Latin. And with Odoric travelled the Tibetan funerary birds, and from this success, the birds assumed even more popularity, as his account of “Tibet” or “Ryboth” found itself incorporated, as you might have expected, into the Book of John Mandeville.

The key difference between Mandeville and Odoric is not Mandeville’s omission of the final, negative judgment. That happy deletion had already happened in Odoric’s 1351 French translation, Mandeville’s more immediate source, which ends its account of Ryboth only by speaking of the honor done the father. The difference is, instead, something that appears in every Mandeville I’ve read (including the Latin here or here). To save you the work of checking mine, and because there are no word count limits on the internets, here is my record of (mostly) the English versions, from printed sources:

and the birds of the country, which have long known the custom, come flying above -- such as vultures, eagles, and all other birds that eat flesh -- and the priests throw pieces of the flesh to them, and they carry it not far away and eat it (insular French, 182, trans Higgins; possibly the earliest version)

And briddes of the contré cometh thider, for they knoweth the custome, and they flieth aboute hem as egles and other briddes eteth, and eteth the flesshe. And the prestes casteth the flessh to hem, and they berith hit a little thenne and eteth hit. (Defective Version, 2770-73133, ed. Kohanski and Benson, and the most widespread of the English Mandevilles; Anthony Bale’s translation in modern English here)

And [the] byrdes of the countre come theder. For they know Well the custome. And they flye above theym as they were Egles and other Byrdes: that ete flesshe. And the preestys cast the pecces unto them and they bere hit a lytell from thens and than they ete it (Richard Pynson’s 1496 printing, based on a version of the “Defective” Mandeville; used again in Wynken de Worde, 1499; likewise in a 1568 printing; very small changes—“about” and “then” for “above” and “then” —happen in 1582, repeated in 1612, 1618, 1639, &c, into 1705 and 1722) 

And the foules of raveyne of alle the contree abowten [that] knowen the custom of long tyme before comen fleenge abouen in the eyr, as egles, gledes, rauenes, and othere foules of raveyne that eten flesch. And than the preestes casten the gobettes of the flesch, and than the foules eche of hem taketh that he may and goth a litille thens and eteth it, And so thei don whils ony pece lasteth of the dede body. (Cotton, 224, ed Seymour) 

And the Fowles of raveyne of alle the Contree abouten knowen the custom of long tyme before, and comen fleenge aboven in the Eyr, as Egles, Gledes, Ravenes and othere Foules of raveyne, that eten Flesche. And than the Preestes casten the gobettes of the Flesche; and than the Foules eche of hem takethe that he may, and gothe a litille thens and etethe it: and so thei don whils ony pece lastethe of the dede Body. (1725 printing, proud of being based on the Cotton. This is the first comparative, scholarly edition, and, like a scholar, it snipes at its predecessors: “all other printed Editions are so curtail'd and transpos'd, as to be made thereby other Books”; Google’s version lacks a charming handwritten note in the copy scanned for Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Read its whole introduction: as with Elizabeth Elstob, it’s an essential piece in the development of English medieval studies) 

And fewles of þe cuntree þat knawez þe custom commez þider and houers abouue þam, as vowltures, egles, rauyns, and oþer fewlez of rauyne. and þe prestez castez þis flesch to þam, and þai bere it a lytill þeine and etez it. (Egerton Version, 167, ed. Seymour) 

Than cometh foules fest fleenge / That knoweth the maner of þat doynge / And etenne the flesshe eueri dele, / For thei knowe the custome wele. (Metrical Version, 2826-29, Seymour; the Metrical version is so highly idiosyncratic that it may deserve a post of its own)

One 1705 printing, based on the “defective version,” misses the Tibet bit, as does the 24-page (!) version, printed at least four times from 1710 to the 1780s, and which stands among the last Mandevilles produced without pretentions to scholarly antiquarianism, and also as the Mandeville most ruthlessly winnowed to its zaniest core: all who teach Mandeville should teach it, alongside the introduction to the 1725 scholarly edition. To tempt you, here is its complete title:

 The Foreign Travels and Dangerous Voyages of that renowed English Knight Sir John Mandeville. Wherein he gives an Account of Remote Kingdoms, Countries, Rivers, Castles, and Giants of a prodigious Height and Strength. Together with the People called Pigmies, very small and of a low Stature. 

To which is added, An account of People of odd Deformities, some without Heads, --- Also dark inchanted Wildernesses, where are fiery Dragons, Griffins, and many wonderful Beasts of Prey, in the Country of Prester John. --- All very delightful to the Reader.

In printed editions, illustrations of sky burial portray one of three things:

the father corpse’s, bent on hands and knees, with blood gushing from the stump of its neck; above it is a knight (perhaps a priest in knightly garb) with a sword, handing the father’s head, on a platter, to his son (1481 (also here) and 1482 German printing (in full color), quite similar to this;

two naked men standing over or nearly straddling a table, one holding an arm and a leg, the other a cleaver, with nothing on the table itself but a head, while birds swoop about them, flying off with bits of body (1499, German);

one perhaps naked man, with a cleaver, and two nearly naked companions, wearing what may be medieval speedos, likewise around a table, with birds making off with body parts (1488, German; or this one, 1481).

This latter is similar to this c. 1425-1450 German Mandeville, St. Gallen, Stiftsarchiv (Abtei Pfäfers), Cod. Fab. XVI, 101v, with two fully clothed men, one a priest in a robe, each with cleavers, around a table on which lies a mostly intact, bald corpse, itself in a black speedo, while 2 birds make off with a hand and a foot. A similar image appears in this well-known French manuscript (BNF fr. 2810, 223r), which lacks the speedo, and has the priest only standing by, flanked by two attendants. These latter types must have their origin in illustrations of Evilmerodach.

My current sense is that illustrations were not terribly common, and, furthermore, that English printed books were content just to copy German illustrations, and, furthermore, that they compounded that lazy efficiency by letting this plagiarized program of illustration taper off before the book’s final sections, where the sky burial passage appears: prior to the nineteenth century, no English printed edition that I know of illustrates sky burial. Neither do any of the digitized manuscripts or printed books have marginalia, annotation, or doodling in the sections of sky burial, so, for now, here is a case where modern edited texts may be mostly sufficient for interpretation.

Mandeville, 1488 printing, Strasbourg

III. Your Bodies, Ourselves: On Waste, Wanting, and our Feathered Friends

Mandeville’s account of sky burial chiefly differs from Odoric’s in its awareness of the cultural participation of the hungry birds in this ritual. Birds come because they know the custom. We know this kind of behavior is not atypical for birds, squirrels, goldfish, or the other critters of city parks, which all know well what a sandwich, or a bag of bread and a pensioner, promise. We and other animals habituate ourselves to each other. We like to be their hosts; we find it amusing to watch them eat; we like to feel that we’re helping out somehow.

Admittedly, this all may be pushing too hard at Mandeville. A Tibetan plateau is not a city park. But even the most cautious interpretation must still recognize Mandeville’s careful attention to nonhuman behavior, and, more importantly, to their essential function for this ritual. Here is a case where the edibility of the human corpse is not a battlefield horror, as with most medieval accounts of bodies eaten by birds; nor is it a sign of the transience, and hence contemptibility, of all mortal things, as with most, if not all, medieval accounts of bodies eaten by worms, toads, and other swarming things of the grave. Nor is it hidden away underground, a repulsive sign of the body’s failure, offered up to others as a warning against worldly attachment.

Here edibility is instead part of the public acts of mourning, of familial attachment, especially of material connection of father to son. Managed edibility also recognizes the material stuff of life, and how this material stuff will always come to belong to some other body, and so forth, until this whole sublunary world comes to nothing. This ceremony recognizes, as well, that we are not exempt from this attachment to bodies at once ours and destined for others: not only the birds partake of the corpse. When the human – at least in Odoric and Mandeville – share out tidbits of the father’s head among friends, they join the birds in this simultaneous recognition of body as flesh and as a temporary home.

In brief, Mandeville’s account recognizes that we are bodies, made of the same material stuff as other bodies, while also recognizing that the passing association in which matter becomes, for a time, self, also counts for something. We love these bodies and these selves that are never just our own. Mandeville doesn’t pretend that bare materialism is the one answer, that our whole family is made of meat; but, in this passage, he doesn’t argue that we’re not meat, either. Within this consumable world, not one or the other answer will suit.

Mandeville's accomplishment can be best understood by comparison to a set of modern works concerned with feeding birds. Greta Alfaro’s “In Ictu Oculi” (also) consists of a single camera trained on a banquet table, laden with food, open to the sky. Then vultures arrive, in shocking numbers, to eat and fight over and through the dinner, until they leave nothing behind but shambles. Valerie Hegarty’s crows do similar work: in 2013, they mangled and tore at several historical rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. These birds are reminders of death (the most famous “in ictu oculi,” I’ve just learned, is this painting); they are chaotic eruptions into the bourgeois order of dining and reception protocol, like the famous Last Supper of Buñuel’s Viridiana. In effect, these birds are worms, representing and enacting the fundamental, filthy disorder of this mortal world.

Mandeville likewise diverges from several works, all titled “Sky Burial,” published over the last 16 years in a clump of literary journals (feel free to alert me to others). Representative gobettes: Vida Chu “bodiless soul / set free” (Literary Review 1999); David Citino, “carrion me” returned to “bless the soil” (Southern Review 2000); Wanda S. Praisner, “‘You see?’ I say, / pointing to the birds. / But she doesn’t” (“Earth and Sky Burials,” Paterson Literary Review, 2004); Hoag Holmgren (in prose), “ancient burial ceremony for humans,” “a giving back…nothing wasted” (Gettysburg Review 2005); Peter Pereira, “released to the sky,” “not dust into dust / but flesh into flesh” (Prairie Schooner 2006); Cara Dorris, on a murdered (?) woman, “the vultures have already flown to the / light, yet / something is alive here” (Cicada 2010); Dean Koontikoff, whose stubbornly anti-spiritual poem breaks the convention, “To the side a fire pit / cradles jigsaw pieces of charred / bone in its ashen basket: a skull” (This Magazine, 2010); Joseph Harrison, “summoned, for centuries,” “flying / ever higher, / They disarticulate / In wind and sun” (Parnassus 2013); and Eric Weinstein, “A smudge of dust or mud goes / undissolved, though it grows less // with each digestion by another” (Michigan Quarterly Review 2014). These might be understood as works that, mostly, imagine our world as wormless.

I do like many of these. Some, however, mistakenly believe that Tibetans expose their dead because they lack timber for burning corpses or soft earth for digging, as if Tibetans did not practice other methods of burial (including inhumation), as if all practices but inhumation were deviations from the norm (for this critique, 69), and as if all culture can be traced to a practical origin having to do with one's natural environment (a kind of ecological evo-psych; see also the otherwise excellent Sandman “World’s End,” 121, for an example of this error). Several more of the poems characterize the practice as “ancient,” or use some similar marker of antiquity: but Tibetans seem to have picked up the practice only in the tenth century (65; certainly a long time ago, but not “ancient” so far as concerns medieval scholars). And, at any rate, William of Rubruck marked how Tibetan practices, as he understood them, had changed since the time of John of Plano Carpini’s visit. Neither Mandeville nor the European Franciscan missionaries believed the Tibetans practiced an unchanging, older, and – therefore – purer, form of culture than their own: that mistake, rare in the Middle Ages, would have to await the smugly triste dominion of world colonialism (see for example Khanmohamadi and Phillips).

The poems especially tend to take the practice as a balance or giving back, or as an abandonment of bodily constraints: “nothing is wasted,” writes Hoag Holmgren (a sentiment that also features in the “urban death” movement, with its call for composting our corpses: Slate; NYTimes). Given that our earth is not a closed system, given that we thrive, for now, on heat emanating wastefully from our Sun, and given that we have only 1.2 billion more years left to thrive in, the closed loop of the ecological fantasy is simply a bad idea (“heat is a disordered, useless state of energy that is generically the endpoint of an energy flow process”). Life is good at capturing and using heat that would otherwise go to waste, and our atmosphere at deflecting the light that would kill us: heat capture (and, one hopes soon, more effective heat dispersal) is what keeps us going.

And even if this funeral ceremony is a gift to the birds, a gift is always bound up with competition and especially with a continued grasping that marks the thing given as a gift, as having belonged to the giver and as being transferred to someone else, freely, without theft (we can all well imagine the use of reading this whole ceremony through The Gift of Death). For a taste of this competition:

And he that hath most nombre of foules is most worshiped….And thane alle his frendes maken hire avaunt and hire dalyance how the foules comen thider, here v., here vi., here x., and there xx., and so forth” (Mandeville, Seymour 1967, Cotton, 225)

Our social and emotional practices cannot be cancelled out by the gift, nor can these be reduced to pure sense. Bad feelings, misplaced longing, free-floating delight, and rambunctiousness, coupled with the memory and the pride in a lineage and the hope that the birds will come too to affirm our familial pride: all these are too part of the ceremony as Mandeville tells the story. Where culture and energy are concerned, waste is inevitable. Closed loops are an ontotheological fantasy, nothing more.

The project that most closely matches my particular interest in sky burial is the work of Brooklyn artist Alex Branch (written about so well in Alison Kinney’s “Every Creeping Thing that Creepeth”). Her video “Nothing Left to Take Away” (2011) records her feeding a swarm of seagulls on a snowy hillside until she runs – nearly – out of bread. She collapses herself into a nodule, while the seagulls refuse to leave: she has given them – nearly – all that she decided to bring them, and they remain unsatisfied (bad emotions on the nonhuman side too!). But there’s more: Branch is wearing a helmet made of bread, which the seagulls go for, horribly rending chunks from it, as she continues to lie still, letting them take it until, presumably, they fall to complaining again.

Alex Branch, "Nothing left to Take Away," screenshot

We have generosity, bad feeling, bad feeding, and even grief, all at once; attachment to ourselves, which is also to the bodies that enable us to be, for a time; but also disattachment, an ironic displacement from our self-possession once we realize, too, that the stuff that lets us be can never be fully ours.

Where Branch does Mandeville still better, finally, is by being a woman. Her bread armor gets at this better, at the body given over as food to others, and at the traditional associations of women and kitchens and ovens. If the paradigmatic verminous medieval corpse is a woman, a sign of the grotesque truth of feminine beauty so far as clerical misogyny was concerned, then the bird-eaten corpse of Tibet, with the body honored by being eaten, is a man, with all the public honor and dick-measuring that accompanies that. What Branch offers, however, is her own body, “armored” by food, harassed by gulls, hers and vulnerable and a gift all at once, wrapped in art’s high culture, which never offers itself as just a “natural” gift to a fundamentally sensible world. This is a practice that collapses the distance between vulnerability and (a male fantasy of) permanence; Branch is turning herself into remains, but remaining here too as the artist. I can imagine, finally, that she and Elaine Tin Nyo might have something to say to one another.

Fire, Air, Earth, Water: Elemental Order vs. Phenomenological Order

by KARL STEEL

First, read Eileen's post on the new issue of postmedieval, which looks like one for the ages. And then Jeffrey's 2014 retrospective, and then this, below, which I suspect may be the final ITM post for 2014.

Or maybe not?
  Here's a T-O Map from the Mandeville epitome that begins that famous fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany, British Library Add 37049, f. 2v. (also famous for including the unique copy of the Middle English "Disputation between the Body and the Worms," which I write about here).

Warning: I'm not a map scholar, and, as Chet van Duzer probably already said what I'm about to say here, I apologize. Be patient and imagine briefly that you're one of my students, befuddled, curious, and confused. Or imagine you're one of my colleagues, ideally one who knows more about paleography, maps, and medieval science than I do. I humbly submit myself to the correction of all. 

I'm fond of this map because it comprises two intersecting two-dimensional planes, which together generate an approximation of three dimensions. Note, first, the geography: the left bottom quadrant is Europa, the right bottom quadrant Affrica, and the top half Asya (if I'm reading that right). Various cities and regions have been labeled: Syria, Alpes, Roma, Gallia (France), Hispania, Ethiopia, Carthago, etc.

Meanwhile, at the very top we find a band of red, which is Fire; below that, a band of clouds running through a scribble of blue, which is Air; below that, written below a band of trees, Earth; and then, dividing the Asia, Europe, and Africa, the element of Water.

If fire, being lightest, is above the slightly heavier air, and if both of these are above the surface of the earth, then the labeling of elements intersects the world map at a perpendicular. There's a catch, though: as earth is heavier than water, the labeling of elements reverses the final two, as it places water, incorrectly, below the earth. The simple explanation is that this reversal just represents our experience of our world: so long as we're not wading or drowning (or being rained upon), earth, for us, is above the water, whatever the claims of natural science.

The reversal also neatly represents our world's slightly off-kilter arrangement of elements, as explained by one far-seeing mid-fourteenth-century theorist. Jean Buridan's commentaries on Aristotle's De caelo et mundi and Meteorologica consider the question of whether the whole earth is habitable. His answer? One quarter, yes, the rest not. He doesn't get to that conclusion without some struggle. In Joel Kaye's summary, Buridan first:

raises a question that Aristotle had never considered: why would any one quarter of the earth be more likely to remain above water and habitable than any other quarter?...Given the spherical nature of the earth, given that according to Aristotelian physics all earth falls naturally to the earth's center, given the great abundance of water with respect to land, and assuming with Aristotle...that the universe is eternal...why in the fullness of time should any portion of land whatsoever remain habitable above water? (94)

To save the world from drowning, Buridan concocts "an interconnected physical system in dynamic equilibrium" (95), in which heat and cold make the earth above waters slightly lighter than drowned earth, so that the earth's weight and its center of magnitude slightly differ. Only the earth below the waters is as cold as it naturally should be. The off-kilter interaction of earths of varying density, balanced in an eternal motion of unbalance, keeps exactly one ever-shifting quarter of the earth above water (96).

Is this eternal, Weeble Wobbly unbalance what's represented by the T-O map of BL Add 37049? Doubtful. More likely, it represents the lived, human experience of elements, with the earth below us, and the water, we hope, even lower. But were some Carthusian bro a committed Aristotelian (unlikely!), we can imagine him looking at this map, on the verge of unloosing yet another "well, actually," but then thinking back to his studies, and resting content, temporarily above the waters.

(for more on floods, see Jeffrey here, with "Drown").

Mandeville, Tolerance, Circumnavigation and the Jews

by J J Cohen

In that recent issue of PMLA about which I raved, Karma Lochrie has a provocative essay on "Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville's Cosmopolitan Utopia." Lochrie renders the Mandeville-author an early version of Dipesh Chakrabarty. "Mandeville's paean to difference," she writes, "is more than an expression of tolerance: it is an insistence upon the provincialism of European knowledge, Christianity, and cultural achievement. In this insistence lies the utopian possibility of his cosmopolitan ethos" (596). Lochrie's Mandeville is quite different from the Foucaultian, knowledge-organizing version of the author in Geraldine Heng's tightly argued Empire of Magic, and has far more guiding personality than the textual-effect he becomes in Iain Higgin's Writing East.

As the keywords "cosmopolitan" and "utopia" suggest, though, there isn't much room within such a project for moments when Mandeville's forbearance falters. Lochrie acknowledges Mandeville's three infamous moments of anti-Judaism: his breezy attribution of deicide to the Jews for their role in crucifying Jesus (including their attempt to hide the cross); his narration of an episode in which the Jews attempt to murder all Christians via a poison found in Borneo; and his story of the lost tribes of Israel, Gog and Magog, enclosed in the Caspians and awaiting liberation so that they can destroy Christendom. These are uncomfortable episodes, and no amount of explaining can really diminish Mandeville's charges. Lochrie handles the three episodes by pointing out that Mandeville's anti-Judaism is not unrelenting, and that one version of Mandeville's Travels grants Jews and Christians a common descent through Japheth. That's not enough (as she admits) to obviate the Christ-killing and enduring threat against Christendom, but she writes:

This is not to deny that his remarks are anti-Judaic or that they pose problems for his cosmopolitanism. The question becomes whether Mandeville's blind spot utterly compromises his cosmopolitan, utopian vision in the rest of the book. I do not think it does, particularly when the blind spot is read in terms of, instead of against, his cosmopolitanism. Read in this way Mandeville's cosmopolitanism criticizes and corrects his own limitations by chastening the presumptive Christian perspective ... Mandeville's vision exceeds and in fact implicitly critiques his anti-Judaic episodes in his book. (597-98)

I find myself attracted to this view, and keep thinking back to the moment when Mandeville narrates how a traveler almost circumnavigates the world. This is what I've written about that scene before:

Having passed through India and the five thousand isles that lie beyond its shores, he arrives at an island where “he herde his owen speech” in the words of men driving cattle. The traveler takes the language to be a marvel rather than a marker of return. Mandeville, however, insists that the man had come so far in his journey that he had arrived “into his owen marches” –England’s borders, the edge of that known world abandoned so long ago. Finding no transportation forward, the traveler “turned agayn as he com, and so he hadde a gret travayl.” After having finally arrived home and (apparently) too restless to long remain, the man sails to Norway. Storm-driven to an island in the North Sea, he encounters an eerily familiar scene:

And when he was ther, hym thoughte that hit was the yle the which he hadde y-be on byfore, where he hurde speke his owen speche as the men drof beestys. And that myght ryght wel be. (67)

A man circles the world to meet a place intimate and strange at once, to meet in a way his own past, his own self, but from an unanticipated perspective.

The story-teller who is a failed circumambulist stays forever in motion, and in so doing nearly arrives at his own point of departure, almost has the chance to see his own receding back, almost can view his world from an unexpected perspective. In the moment, he fails at that recognition. He does not see the gift he has received, that the point of view belonging to the world's hither side is suddenly his own. He turns back, he revoyages the wide world needlessly, not knowing that what he witnessed as other was himself. Only retrospectively, when the knowledge is almost lost, does he realize that the geography upon which he once stood -- upon which he has perhaps always stood -- is equally alien and intimate.

You could argue (and I think Lochrie does argue) that John Mandeville fails a similar test of recognition. He possesses the chance to view from the hither side the shape of his own identity, to see that it is built in part from anti-Judaism (a component perhaps of his real or invented Englishness). A potential cosmopolitanism that extends so far it encircles the world is a one of the few possibilities from which he averts his eyes, turns his back, returns to a journey that will bring him on a familiar but useless route to the Saint Albans in which he was born, and where he will write the ending of his travels, and die.

[edited late in the day to remove an incoherent sentence]

Between Christian and Jew

by J J Cohen

So the abstract for my IMC Leeds plenary is due, an obligation complicated by the fact that grading and end of the semester student meltdowns have conspired to reduce my number of functional neurons to three (half the number I am used to working with).

Please let me know what you think of this first stab. As you will see, I am interested in an interrelated series of questions: how did medieval and how do contemporary interpreters use Jews to tell stories of Christian-Jewish separation? What spaces in between such narratives of segregation can be discerned in which keen division yields to messier interpenetrations? (Daniel Boyarin calls them "lines of influence and dialogue [that] go in both directions").

I don't want to assume in advance that we know what Christian or Jewish orthodoxy consists of: that is, orthodoxy tends to be a retroactive positing of some undifferentiated and homogenous identity that belies the mixed, impure realm of lived belief. Scholars have done quite a good job of emphasizing the diversity of Christian practice in medieval England, arguing against a monolithic orthodoxy ... but Judaism still tends to be defined as if it enters Europe unchanged by its surroundings, that lived Ashkenazic Jewishness in, say, thirteenth century Lincoln is rather similar to fourth century rabbinic Judaism, that medieval Jews don't acculturate. I'm following the line of thought established by Boyarin, Yuval, Ivan Marcus and others to postulate a more adaptive mode of Jewishness, a hybridity with counterparts in many contemporary formulations of Jewish identity. I'm attempting to do this by looking at Christian-Jewish interaction as glimpsed within texts that typically are analyzed for their strong separations: the Book of John Mandeville, Matthew Paris on the Hugh of Lincoln. Are there any texts (especially British ones) where glimpses of a Christian-Jewish middle space exist that I might not have thought of?

Between Christian and Jew:
Orthodoxy, Violence and Living Together in Medieval England

For medieval thinkers, Islam might constitute a heresy rather than a separate religion: Muhammad had deviated from a Christian path. Judaism, on the other hand, was the source from which Christianity traced its origin, and yet it was unthinkable that Christianity should be a Jewish heresy. Though possible for “Jew” to function as a synonym for “heretic” (as Margery Kempe learned during interrogation over her own orthodoxy), Jews were usually seen as temporally other to Christians: locked ever into an anterior time, long ago superceded by Latin Europe. Yet Ashkenazic Jewish communities came to cohabitate with Christians in cities across France, Germany, and England. Extant literary and historical texts suggest that these Jews offered through their rituals and their words a sharp challenge to Christian self-assurance. From the time they first begin to live among the English, they become a community intimately involved in deliberation over proof and religious belief.

Much scholarship on medieval Jews examines how they functioned in the Christian imagination, typically as unreal (spectral, hermeneutic or virtual) figures who enabled Christianity to envision itself as distinct from its Judaic source. The real life extension of such excision is physical and property-directed violence: negative representation cannot be divorced from the pogroms of 1190. Yet medieval texts provide ample evidence that Jews and Christians lived for long periods simply as neighbors. This paper will discuss what happens in the lived spaces between Christians and Jews, where there existed a potential for amity (beneath the story of Hugh of Lincoln is a tale of friendship across faiths) as well as complexity within hostility (a famous lapse in tolerance in The Book of John Mandeville might reveal more about Christian-Jewish interrelations, and the possibility of actually listening to contemporary Jews, than has previously been acknowledged).

This emphasis upon lived, middle space enabled the medieval Jew to cease to be a monster, an allegory, or a lachrymose martyr, becoming instead an embodied and culturally impure being whose temporality is not determined by the past (an Old Testament remnant) or future (as proto-Holocaust victim). The Jews of medieval England, I will argue, are so troubling to Christian orthodoxy for their very modernity.

Bodies in Motion 3: Or Any Other Beauty We Share with Stone

[image: naked cave-dwellers of Tracota guard their traconite; Cynocephali worship an ox. BL Harley MS 3954 f.40v Three other images from this MS are on the BL website, including some blemmyae and Hippocrates' daughter]
by J J Cohen

Behold Part III of my Mandeville series, the final installation. The essay is well on its way to solidification as a chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature, but will no doubt mutate into other things as well. Part one is here, part two here, part four here.

The Book of John Mandeville records how a traveler once journeyed the earth’s roundness, only to turn back at that point where his relentless forward motion had almost conveyed him to the place of his departure. This story, overheard by Mandeville in his youth, exerts a peculiar grip upon his imagination: the narrator describes the tale as one “Y have y-thought man tymes.” A “worthy man of oure countré” decides to leave England -- and not for pilgrimage, not for redemption, but for no other reason than “to se the worlde” (67). Having passed through India and the five thousand isles that lie beyond its shores, he arrives at an island where “he herde his owen speech” in the words of men driving cattle. The traveler takes the language to be a marvel rather than a marker of return. Mandeville, however, insists that the man had come so far in his journey that he had arrived “into his owen marches” –England’s borders, the edge of that known world abandoned so long ago. Finding no transportation forward, the traveler “turned agayn as he com, and so he hadde a gret travayl.” After having finally arrived home and (apparently) too restless to long remain, the man sails to Norway. Storm-driven to an island in the North Sea, he encounters an eerily familiar scene:

And when he was ther, hym thoughte that hit was the yle the which he hadde y-be on byfore, where he hurde speke his owen speche as the men drof beestys. And that myght ryght wel be. (67)

A man circles the world to meet a place intimate and strange at once, to meet in a way his own past, his own self, but from an unanticipated perspective.

According to Mandeville, any traveler can potentially arrive home again by remaining ever in motion. But “the erthe is gret” and “ther beth so many wayes”: Mandeville never states that anyone has successfully circled the earth to arrive at his departure, to attain home via an endlessly curving route. Yet if the man who almost circled the world has any regrets about not completing the compass, he never voices them. The traveler who so inspired Mandeville as a young man is never witnessed returning to the England of his birth. He is glimpsed only upon the road or the sea, never since his initial departure within “oure countré.” What would happen if this traveler really had circumambulated the globe? Would he then have settled into sedentary life? Or must he turn back before he arrives because, having so filled his life with motion, the stillness of a homeland – the stasis of an English identity -- no longer proves able to satisfy? Mandeville, Defective: always open to the future, never to arrive comfortably at home.

Mandeville’s boyhood imagination is captured by a traveler who nearly circles the world but abandons the journey at the borders of home. He does not fully recognize the familiar, perhaps because he himself has become in his wandering strange. Maybe that is why the traveler’s story is so alluring to Mandeville: the man must never return, the voyage must never be completed, for the only way to keep a body in motion is to prevent its coming home. Mandeville, of course, does return: he writes his Book while resident in the England from which he had been long absent. Yet in the Defective version, that return is not wholly satisfying: no sooner is the book completed than Mandeville is in transit to Rome. He totes his volume to the Pope, who gives the narrative his papal seal of approval. As the narrative comes to a close, Mandeville is traveling again … this time (according to the Book’s narrative fiction) in his memory, his mind, his armchair. Rather like medieval readers of the Book, rather like us, his “partyners” (95).

I wonder, though, since I’m now including medieval readers among the bodies the book puts into motion: would his fellow pilgrims have recognized the limits of their companion’s tolerance? Would they have realized the brake that Mandeville’s Englishness places upon his restless trajectory? Would they have realized that Mandeville’s failure was perhaps, like the English Traveler who set out before him, to have almost circled the world, but to have returned before he could arrive home by a route that would have changed his perspective, that would have queered his orientation, that would have made him see what remains stubbornly in place when a voyager who wants to “se the world” carries with him and transports back the failings of his home?

Mandeville is sometimes confined by the compass of his own Englishness, by the limits of his own devotional circuit, as if these were (following Bale) lapidary narratives, marble tombs. Yet the Book is also geological, in the rocky triple meaning of that word: sedimentary (an accretion of histories and texts into new forms), igneous (hardened after long movement into settled contours), metamorphic (ever changing, open to the future, circling the world to meet and no longer recognize oneself). Each text of the Book can be seen as a crystallization, a hardening, a gem created from an ever-fluid narrative that does not ever cease to be a body in motion, ready for metamorphoses to come.

Geological Mandeville
In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, if we look just off to the side of the vacant compass that Joseph of Arimathea drew, we will find ourselves confronted not only with the stone of an ancient tomb, but with a scattering of other rocks: the “rooch” of Calvary, its whiteness forever stained by the dripping of divine blood (38); four rocks near the pillar at which Jesus was scourged, continually dropping water in an endless act of terrestrial mourning; the “roche” under which the Jews hid the cross for Saint Helena to exhume. Such stones commemorate the past by standing in for it: the relics they hid were long ago removed, the death for which they shed their endless tears vanquished by a bodily return to life. Yet these lithic monuments might activate in a careful reader a wider chain of associations – for the Book offers a story told through stones.

Sir John Mandeville is widely known for his geographical obsessions, but these unfold beside, along with, and through passions best described as geological. To give some highlights: [in Tyre one can see the stone on which Jesus sat to preach (32).] Not far from Jerusalem is the Fosse Ynone (Ditch of Memnon), where an eternal supply of undulating gravel can change suddenly into glass (32). This oceanic expanse of rock may be a gulf of the Gravel Sea. The Sultan built his great city “upon a rooch,” and nearby are stones left for Saint Katherine by angels (33). Not far from Damascus a voyager can see the ground from which Adam was fashioned, and the rock-hewn cave inside which he dwelt with Eve once expelled from Paradise (35). The Dead Sea casts forth chunks of asphalt, big as horses (45). By its shores spreads the barren plain upon which a fasting Jesus was tempted to transform stones into bread. In the river Jordan, the Children of Israel left enormous stones “in the myddel of the water” when through a miracle they passed over its bed dryshod (46). On the rock outside of Nazareth where some Jews attempted to hurl Jesus to his death can still be viewed his footprints, burned into the stone when he vanished from his would-be assassins (49). The Saracen Paradise features homes wrought of precious stones (54). Diamonds have a gender, as well as a sexuality: male and female come together to create even more of the glistening rocks (62):

They groweth togodres, the maule and the femaule. And they beth noryshed with the dew of hevene, and they engendreth comunely and bryngeth forth other smale dyamaundes, that multeplieth and groweth all yeres.

Engendering “comunely” renders diamonds, with their lithic promiscuity, rather like the soon to be encountered Lamorians, who keep all women “in commune” (65). Mandeville avers that he knows from experience feeding your diamonds with May dew makes them increase in size. Diamonds of either sex can overcome poison, prevent strife, banish evil dreams. They can also heal lunatics … and Englishmen, we are told, are “lunar,” rendering them – like Mandeville -- incessant travelers (62).

Some of the world’s heaving seas obscure magnetic stones (“roch of the adamaund” 62) in their depths, pulling to oblivion any ship manufactured with metal nails. A sea without bottom has reeds that float its surface; in their roots are tangled “many precious stones of vertu” that protect their bearers from bodily harm (69). The beastly men of Tracota covet a stone called “traconyghte,” not because it possesses any innate virtue but simply because it comes in 40 attractive colors (70). Cyconcephali carry foot-long rubies around their necks as a sign of kingly office (70). The Great Khan prefers his accouterments of daily living to be fashioned from jewels. Rubies and garnets worked into grapevine designs seem his household favorite. Even the steps to his throne and the chair itself are hewn from gems and bordered in gold (73). The Khan also possesses a radiant carbuncle that serves effectively as a palace nightlight (77).

For no reason other than a seemingly innate animus, Alexander the Great attempts to enclose the Jews “of the kynde of Gog Magog” (82) in far-off hills. When human labor proves insufficient to the task, Alexander seeks God’s assistance, and is rewarded by divine imprisonment of these people: “God herd his prayer and enclosed the hilles togedre so that the Jewes dwelleth ther as they were y-loke in a castel.” The gates that confine the homicidal race are wrought of “great stones wel y-dight with sement.” A barrier that will not be overcome until the time of Antichrist, these rocks keep the Jews removed from the stream of time, just as their ancient Hebrew locks them in a perpetual premodern (83). Submarinal “roches of adamaundes” not far from the lands of Prester John, meanwhile, freeze matter in place. Like underwater magnets they bind to themselves ships with iron fittings. Mandeville tells us he once went to see the expanse, and in a rare moment of poetry he describes a forest fashioned of naval masts: “Y say as hit had y-be a gret ile of trees growing as stockes. And oure shipmen sayde that thilke trees were of shippes mastes that sayled on see, and so abode the shippes ther thorgh vertu of the adamaund” (84).
Prester John’s domain is home to the Gravel Sea, where rocks and sand “ebbeth and floweth with gret wawes as the see doth. And it resteth never” (84). This billowing sea of stone sports fish “of good savour and good to ete.” Prester John, like the Great Khan whose daughter he weds, prefers housewares, eating utensils, and furniture made of gleaming gems, for jewels and precious metals betoken “his nobley and his might” (85). The Vale Perilous is strewn with gems, gold and silver to lure covetous men to their deaths. In the middle of this terrible place is a rock on which is engraved the “visage and the heed of the devel boylich, right hydous and dredful to se” (86). His eyes stare, colors swirl, fire erupts from mouth and nostrils. An island exists in which women have “stones in her eyen”; when enraged they can slay men with their vision (87). On an island so distant that few stars shine and the moon is viewed only its last quarter dwell ants (“pismeres”) as large as hounds. They gather the abundant gold into great heaps. Local men use clever tricks to rob the insects of their hoards (91). East of the land of Prester John are only “great roches,” their stony lifelessness the mark of impassable wilderness. Paradise is hidden behind immobile rocks (92).

In his meditation on stone as a radiantly beautiful material and a durable spur to philosophy, John Sallis writes of stone’s “peculiar temporality”:

Stone is ancient, not only in the sense that it withstands the wear of time better than other natural things, but also in the sense that its antiquity is of the order of the always already. Stone comes from a past that has always been present, a past inassimilable to the order of time in which things come and go in the human world; and that nonbelonging of stone is precisely what qualifies to mark and hence memorialize such comings and goings, such births and deaths. As if stone were a sensible image of timelessness, the ideal material out on which to inscribe marks capable of visibly memorializing into an indefinite future one who is dead and gone.

Such everlasting stones are certainly part of the landscape of the Book: they mark tombs and discoveries and great events. Stone is the perfect material to use to think about that which cannot be transported or transmuted. Thus in the wilderness outside Bethany Mandeville relates the biblical story of the temptation of Jesus by the “devel of Helle” (45). The fiend commands the fasting savior “Dic ut lapides isti panes fiat,” or “Say that these stones ben maked bred” (45). Only divine power can perform such transubstantiation. For a human to contemplate such volatility in lapidary substance would be extreme folly.

Yet the transmutation of rock through words is precisely what the Mandeville-author accomplishes. In the Book, stone is a strangely mobile, even itinerant material. Though rocks never do become bread, we watch as they billow into waves, as they offer us the miracle of fish from a gravel sea, as they exude rays of light and virtue. Rocks pull metals towards their embrace. They mate licentiously and engender baby gems. The stones that mark the Mandevillian landscape are of two kinds: those that affix history to place, and those that act like bodies in motion. The former anchor the narrative, the latter unmoor the Book, alluring and mobile rocks that are indistinguishable from flows of water or lava. Anchoring stone – the igneous accretions left behind by molten flow – include inert wealth, lonely ruins, rock-hewn gates that bar Paradise or seclude Jews, empty tombs. These are historical residua, depositories of ancient stories, unmoved markers of vanished time. Metamorphic or nomadic stones serve not as suture points but as spurs to constant motion: the endless pull of “adamaund,” the restless roil of the Gravelly Sea, living practice that unfolds within inhabited space (the Sultan reconfigures a church, diamonds mate and reproduce and are traded by the wayfarers they ward).

Undulating, magnetic, lovemaking stones: despite the lapidary effects of religious and national identities, within the Book of John Mandeville even the most static of bodies are spurred into motion.

Seismic Mandeville
What I have been calling for convenience the Book of John Mandeville is in reality not a singular thing but a diffuse and volatile concatenation. There is no “The Book of John Mandeville,” only a proliferation of Books of Mandeville, few of which have a historically identifiable author, redactor, or translator, all of which vary in major or minor ways from their apparent siblings, parents, cousins, queer friends, assorted hangers-on. Developing a vocabulary adequate to capturing the Books has proven a difficult critical task (as my foray into kinship metaphors just proved; other critics turn to chemistry or biology for their taxonomic metaphors). The text refuses to settle down into some well-delimited identity. Is it a reinvented itinerarium, a spur to pilgrimage, a Crusading substitute, an armchair travel guide, a romance, a heretical tract, a paean to orthodoxy, a proto-novel, an imaginative delectation of the exotic and the monstrous, a compilation, an encyclopedia? Yes. And because it is all these things at once it breaks generic boundaries and can’t be sorted neatly for library filing. No wonder Greenblatt called the Book a “hymn to mobility.” Though a bricolage of materials drawn from a dizzying array of texts (mainly French and Latin), the Book of John Mandeville seems almost sui generis: nothing quite like it exists.

Iain Macleod Higgins, the critic who has studied the dynamic and dispersed existence of the Mandeville manuscripts most closely, describes the Book as a “multi-text”:

The Book can be regarded not as a single, invariant work, but as a multinodal network, a kind of rhizome, whose French ‘radical’ gave rise to a discontinuous series of related offshoots in several languages, each of which can vary considerably from the others while being The Book itself to certain readers … Clearly, The Book is more than several books at once, both in its origins and generically; it is textually multiple as well (“Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville,” 32-33)

Critical consensus holds that the Book was first composed in French (and likely continental French), though no original exists. No text inhabits the center of the compass away from which speed two continental and one Anglo-French versions, away from which scatter a plethora of English variants with Egypt gaps or in rhyme or in close sympathy with French forebears, away from which are propelled at farther and farther removes German, Latin, Irish, Italian, Danish and Spanish redactions. At the center of this Big Bang that sent Mandevilles careening through Latin Christendom is only … the Postulated Archetype, an ur-Book that we assume must have been in existence at some point. When the Postulated Archetype abandoned its sepulcher in Palestine to retreat to that heaven where perfect texts reside, it left no earthly trace of its having been here, only the lingering textual ripples that suggest its inherent volatility, and perhaps indicate that it never intended to be transfixed like a glossed and reverenced Bible.

The Book of John Mandeville is therefore more of an event than a object: it moves through the world, leaving behind various versions of itself that bear witness to the form it took in a certain place under some influential and typically indeterminable conditions. It would be mistake to look at any one of these precipitates as if it were the Book itself rather than a record of the Book’s passing, just as a lava flow cannot be reconstituted from one of the igneous rocks into which it hardened and then abandoned in its onward rush.

The Books of John Mandeville are best seen as a performance of their own narrative structure, as a textual flow that crosses linguistic and national boundaries in a directionless quest to remain in motion, to circle the world by pressing forward and yet never to return home. This flow might leave in its wake certain crystallizations (manuscript attestations that we read today, but cannot assemble into some singular entity). Like Mandeville’s diamonds these crystals will always copulate with others and form strange new progeny. The Books of Mandeville amount to a body ever in motion, because structurally defective, open, reaching forward not to assimilate but to embrace, to touch and to change. In their proliferation, dispersal, and constant mutation, the Books of John Mandeville display an irreducible surplus not diminishable into the small contours of historical context or local determination. That thing in the Books of Mandeville which renders them ever restless over time, that surplus that can take a body outside of itself and scatter it across a suddenly more capacious world: that exorbitance in Mandeville so tied to an ardor for the lithic, that thing is art, restless and nomadic art.

Unleashed by Books that wander the world to vanish into varying forms is an art in no more human, no more ours alone, than are marble tombs containing manna or missing bodies or monsters, diamonds that yearn for copulation and increase, the heave of Gravel seas, or any other beauty we share with stone.

Bodies in Motion 2: Three Tombs

by J J Cohen

[Part II of my Mandeville "Bodies in Motion" piece. For part I, look here. This southern oriented image of the world, drawn by by the Moroccan cartographer al-Idrisi for King Roger of Sicily in 1154 can be found here. It doesn't have all that much to do directly with Mandeville, but its cultural hybridity and reorganization of space speak to the Book's ambitions.]

We immure bodies within or beneath stone because we possess no weightier material: lithic heaviness keeps the corpse in its place, marks the hope that some trace will there endure even as the dead are lost to us. Christ rose because he could not be kept by such stone; death could not still his divine body. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in Jerusalem, not Satalia – Satalia, that suddenly subterranean metropolis where a mysterious and unnamed “yong man” loved so ardently that he opened the marble tomb withholding the body to which he was devoted. Nine months later a voice commanded “Go to the tumbe of that womman and opene the tumbe and byhold what thow hast gyte on here” (30-31). The young man unseals the stone for a second time, and a flying head swoops out, restless progeny of a corpse not surrendered to mortuary immobility. The airborne head circles his habitation, and “anoon the cité sanke adoun”: the earth swallows Satalia in its entirety. The marble grave here was not empty but too full: with a body not yielded to stillness, with forbidden pleasure, with the monstrous product of a passion that transgressed the limit of death.

Compare a tomb that comes just a bit earlier in the text, that of Saint John the Evangelist at Ephesus (29). We are told two irreconcilable stories about this apostle’s resting place: either John’s body was translated to heaven and the grave filled with manna; or that he entered the tomb while still alive, where he still remains, awaiting the Day of Judgment. “Men may se,” asserts Mandeville, “the erthe of the tumbe many tymes stire and meve, as ther were a quyk thing ther under” (29). What has the unholy passion of the young man at Satalia to say to this tomb of restless occupant? Or to the narrative of the Passion (capital P) in the Book of Mark, where the three women coming to anoint the body of Jesus find that the great rock sealing his tomb has been rolled away [et respicientes vident revolutum lapidem erat quippe magnus valde, Mark 16:4]. A mysterious young man [iuvenem] has already entered the tomb, and he decrees the vacancy of the place: “Be not affrighted; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he is risen, he is not here, behold the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:6). The Holy Sepulchre is empty, and the message of the untenanted tomb is that death itself has perished. Necrophiliac Satalia sinks to the underground; Jerusalem, a place to which every approach is (in Mandeville’s account) uphill, remains the earth’s pinnacle. Could the contrast be more stark? Three tombs, three possibilities: revelation, mystification, boundary-crossing exploration. The tomb of Jesus enjoins the pilgrim who has reached the earth’s omphalos to return home, the trajectory of a conventional itinerarium. Who can blame the tourist who wants to chip a piece off the grave to remember its revelations? But the Sultan who regulates the church no longer allows its rocks to be transported.

The tombs at Satalay and Ephesus, tombs that interrupt the journey to the Holy Land, hint at perilous routes and dangerous dalliances. They suggest in advance that Mandeville will not be content to turn back after reaching Jerusalem. Mandeville’s movement beyond the city does not necessarily take away from its centrality: I don’t think that we witness here, as Stephen Greenblatt argued, “the abandonment of the dream of a sacred center.” As Iain Macleod Higgins has shown, the Mandeville-author stresses Jerusalem’s middleness more than any other medieval writer, a literal as well as symbolic placement that permeates the Book. This world orientation and its consequences are not going to be abandoned by leaving Jerusalem behind – and indeed, the Book will return to the city’s status as center much later, when Mandeville details the sphericity of the earth. Yet at that point of return, as Mandeville describes the potential circumnavigability of the globe, Jerusalem seems to be the top of the world rather than its center. The flatness of a mappamundi possesses a middle: Jerusalem, source-city of history, can be emplaced like the umbilicus of the body of Christ. Yet the Book of John Mandeville repeats, obsessively, that the world is not a disc but a globe: the people of the Isles of Prester John walk beneath English feet (“they ar under the erthe to us” 92), but so far away that their patter is impossible to discern. A dedicated and God-protected traveler could, by always moving forward, “come right too the same countrees that he wer come of and come fro, and so go aboute the erthe” (92).

Spheres do not, of course, possess physical middles. The best to which a globe can aspire would be a conceptual middle, but that is not quite the same thing. If Jerusalem is the world’s center, then that fixed point exists only on maps and timelines that cannot capture the fullness of the world, cannot capture the perpetual curve that gives to lands and waters their unattainable horizons.

Lapidary Mandeville
The errant trajectory of the Book of John Mandeville was suggested early on, when the narratives of Hippocrates’ dragon-encased daughter and the monstrous flying head of Satalay erupted into a pilgrimage narrative (an account based upon a source that contains neither story: these are the Mandeville-author’s additions). The Book gains so much velocity in its narration that it escapes the theology-saturated landscapes of the Holy Land to boomerang through heterodox India, Egypt, Africa, China, Sumatra, Hungary, Amazonia, a multiverse of archipelagos that in their proliferation trade sacred histories for secular multiplicities. Mandeville’s travels are in fact the motions of a body transported by reading, encountering its other worlds in books and fashioning new realms from dynamic textual convergence. The Book of John Mandeville is a literary pastiche, an alchemical experiment concocted of perhaps three dozen sources, from encyclopedias and itineraria to religious tracts, traveler’s tales, and histories. “John Mandeville” seems to have been a fiction, no more likely to have existed than Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The Book of John Mandeville never intended to give us the best routes or the most dogma-soused accounts of sacred sites. An energetic meditation upon the exotic, upon the genre of travel narrative, upon the nature of the world we inhabit, the Book of John Mandeville (in all of its multifarious manifestations) is constitutionally incapable of offering anything but a cosmos where change and movement are constants, and geographies where bodies are caught in perpetual motion, where even the inanimate stirs with a kind of desire-soaked life.

The Book opens by providing those anchoring bits of biography that have propelled readers to locate a real person as the text’s narrator. Born in Saint Albans, John Mandeville is possessed of a nonchalant Englishness, seen most often as he quietly interprets the world from an anglocentric point of view. A knight who “travelide aboute in the world” (21), Sir John possesses a thorn from the crown placed on Jesus at the Passion; served in the Sultan’s army and was offered a wife; drank from the fountain of youth; hates Jews; is a specialist in exotic alphabets; knows good wine and balm and diamonds from bad. These attributes act as truth-effects, attaching the story to what seems a historical personage with lived experience, attaching the narrative to a bulwark, a seeming veridicality. The text sutures itself at the same time to a specific chronology: Mandeville’s year of departure is in the Defective Version 1332; his year of return 1366; his circuit through the world the accomplishment of 34 years in total.

Mandeville’s attachment to home serves as an effective brake upon his nomadism, the guarantee that despite not having turned back after attaining Palestine, he will nonetheless eventually reappear at his point of departure. And indeed it is upon native soil (“my contré,” 95), that we last glimpse him, worn out perhaps by travel, composing the book we now read. An enduring pull within Mandeville’s identity strives to keep him bound in place, to keep him attached to specific designation. This adhesiveness can go under many names, but I think its best designation is Englishness. Whether the lost ur-text of the Book was composed by an author who would have self-identified as English or French is not only impossible to decide, it is ultimately not all that relevant (the supremely English Remains of the Day was written by Kazuo Ishiguro). No matter who the actual author, no matter what collective identity that author would in life have embraced, the Book of John Mandeville is strewn with allusions to its narrator’s nationality, affixing him in history and to place. Some references are trivial, giving the Mandeville-persona a patina of casual Englishness: thus in detailing the Saracen alphabet, he writes that just as they have “extra” letters in their alphabet, so do “we” English possess thorn and yogh (58). Like most medieval English writers, Mandeville glibly conflates “England” and “Britain,” as if the Welsh and Scots did not share the island (Constantine is called “kyng of Ingelond that was that tyme called the Greet Brytayne” 25). The knight’s birthplace is Saint Albans, not far from London; his name is by the fourteenth century sufficiently anglophone … and given the polyglot nature of his contemporary homeland, his Englishness is in no way attenuated when his words sound like this: “ieo Johan Maundeuille, chiualer … neez et norriz Dengleterre de la ville Seint Alban, qi y passay la meer.”

The English Mandeville is a smaller circle within the wider compass drawn by the pilgrim Mandeville whose initial destination is Jerusalem. Just as within the Christian compass, a Jewish presence inheres within the English circle as well: most famously in Mandeville’s fantasy that that a large population of Jews has been immured behind remote hills, ready to mingle with their brethren when freed in the time of Antichrist. Mandeville asserts that Jews living among contemporary Christians study Hebrew so as to welcome in their ancient tongue these enclosed people when they are freed. They will join with them “for to destruye men of Cristendom” (83). Just the opposite configuration of space is closer to the truth: having expelled its Jewish population in 1290, England inhabits an island rather like the enclosed regions where these distant Jews supposedly dwell. Late medieval Englishness is a national identity precipitated through the exclusion of Jewishness. A tiny minority at best, pre-Expulsion Jews in England had been under frequent threat from both their neighbors and from the nation. Their wholesale removal from the island did nothing to reduce English anti-Semitic fantasies. Just the opposite: once gone, they loomed as more of an imagined danger than ever. The Book of John Mandeville is widely regarded for its extensive tolerance, a generosity extended even to the Muslims who hold the Holy Land. Ian Higgins observes:

No other religious community … is so badly served in The Book as the Jews, who inhabit only the past and the future, and are depicted with a hostility bordering on paranoia. (Writing East 42)

Rather than a puzzling lapse in an otherwise tolerant persona, this paranoia may be no more than yet another signifier of Mandeville’s recalcitrant, immobilizing Englishness – an Englishness that cannot be wholly immured from the Jewishness it has abjected.
In The Jew in the Medieval Book, Anthony Bale maps the narrative turbulence coursing through Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, intermixing Christian and Jewish identities. This is flux and instability are counteracted by a “lapidary vocabulary” of tombs and gems, metaphorical petrifications that strive to impede the text’s roiling. Like the description of the litel clergeon as a jewel,
the ‘tombe of marbul stones’ into which the boy’s body is placed (VII:680) is an attempt to contain the expansive landscape and soundscape envisioned in the tale, a reassertion of the Christian community’s faith in the fixity of signs … The tomb stands for morbid permanence and closure … The solid stone tomb repudiates the bodily rupture with which the Prioress is fascinated (85).

In a story filled with blood, tears, songs in constant and boundary-smashing movement, the marble tomb strives to demarcate, contain, and immobilize. The monument of stone fails, however, to still what it contains. The closing stanzas of the tale transport the scene to Lincoln and conflate ancient Syrian Jews with more recent English ones. “The little boy,” Bale writes, “wanders out of his distant Asian tomb into the Prioress’s England and the pilgrimage group” (86).

Of the three tombs we’ve seen in Mandeville, one has been emptied of the body that once occupied it, while the other two are too full: a restless apostle in fitful slumber, awaiting a distant future; the monstrous progeny of illicit union. Given his fascination with such bodies that remain filled with uncanny life even in the grave, shouldn’t John Mandeville be able to escape lapidary capture?

Bodies in Motion I

by J J Cohen
[EDIT 11 AM: I just noticed that the following constitutes ITM's 1,000th post. Happy One Thousand Posts, In the Middle! Your verbosity is an inspiration to us all.]

Below, the first part of my SEMA Mandeville piece. Your comments are welcome, since it is even as we speak being turned into an essay on travel literature for the new Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature.

Quotations are from The Book of John Mandeville, ed. Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007) -- a nice new edition of the text.

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If you urge them with their gross and unworthy misconceptions of the nature and the will of God, or the monstrous follies of their fabulous theology, they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb. You may be told that 'heaven is a wide place, and has a thousand gates'; and that their religion is one by which they hope to enter ... By such evasions they can dismiss the merits of the case from all consideration; and encourage men to think that the vilest superstition may serve to every salutary purpose, and be accepted in the sight of God as well as truth and righteousness. (Archdeacon Potts, 1818; quoted in Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” The Location of Culture)

The Book of John Mandeville is one of the most treacherous texts of the Middle Ages … only, you wouldn’t know it, because the work seems so damn welcoming. Yet the work is as perilous as it is recalcitrant, two qualities intimately connected to and well masked by its “sly civility”: it seems affable enough, it lures you into an encounter … and then it leaves you intellectually beaten up, defeated, wondering how it did that to you. Yet more than its “native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative demand” (as Homi Bhabha would say) the Book is so intractable because it does not in fact exist: there is no singular Book of John Mandeville, but a volatile multiplicity of texts masquerading as a unity. The nonexistence of the Book as object, as thing, has serious consequences for its analysis: we’ll always be chasing after what was supposed to remain on the shelf or in the grave where we placed it, something that keeps moving just beyond the skyline, where terra cognita curves to harbor incalculable islands.

In honor of my peripatetic subject, I will follow a meandering path. But I don’t want to lose you. Here, then, is the rough itinerary I’ll use to pursue this ever-in-transit Questing Beast named the Book of John Mandeville. I will attempt to map the following:

1. How the text transforms itself from a typical account of Holy Land pilgrimage [an itinerarium based upon William of Boldensele’s Liber de quisbusdam ultramarines partibus] to a boundary-defying ethnography capable of almost circling the round earth
2. How the Book populates its worlds with bodies in motion – so much so that things which ought to be utterly immobile (rocks, ruins, graves) are possessed of magnetism, motility, radiative effects that medievals called virtu.
3. How the constant forward motion of the text never arrives at its destination (the globe is circumnavigable only in theory … the world, being Defective, open, can’t be contained in a circle’s enclaspment)
4. How for all the Book’s dreams of a cosmos where bodies are in constant movement, impediments (“lapidary narratives”) nonetheless serve to interrupt the text’s restless itinerary, transfixing the Book to small identities like English … identities which, even if imaginary, are nonetheless a powerful counterweight to the embrace of otherness found elsewhere.
5. Finally, how the Book is ultimately less of a text than an event: how it performs its own content, how the Book itself becomes a body in perpetual motion.

I will be quoting throughout this talk from the version of The Book of John Mandeville known as "Defective," an appellation this group earned because “missing” a section known as the Egypt Gap. I work with this version in part because it possesses the best claim to be “the English Mandeville,” and in part because its supposedly “unfortunate name” captures something profound about why the Book should possess such enduring vitality. Of course, there is no single Defective text, so I’ve settled upon the recently edited British Library MS Royal 17 C. xxxvii, a “highly individualistic” treatment that, even if “somewhat compressed,” nonetheless contains most of the richest material found in other versions (Kohanski and Benson, 14-15). It also contains some fine illustrations, especially of buildings and mountains. Architectures, monuments, ruins and fragments of stone will be my own obsession throughout.

In the Myddel
The Book of John Mandeville was a medieval bestseller, and possibly the most popular travel narrative ever composed: a Fodor’s Guide to Nonexistent Places, the Rough Guide to Naked Communist Cannibals, the Let’s Go Vale Perilous, the Lonely Planet Guide to Polygamous Fantasy Islands. Its pages abound with realms where one might find professional virgin deflowerers (the gadlybyriens, 87), or hermaphrodites who know the enjoyments of both sexes, or an island where a lady still awaits the kiss that will free her from her dragon’s flesh and reward with wealth, a title, and lands the man so brave as to brush his lips against hers (Hippocrates’s daughter, 29-30). Travel narratives, like bestiaries or romances, allow their readers to enjoy pleasures ordinarily withheld, to consume fantasies otherwise precluded. Just as Satalia, the “greet cité" that “sanke adoun” when one of its dwellers could not resist opening a “grave of marble” and being with his beloved one last time – just as subterranean Satalia renders the paths that cross above “parolous passages” (31), so the Book of John Mandeville likewise possesses its textual perilous passages, marble tombs that when opened could divert pilgrims from their certain and orthodox roads.

For despite the salacity of some of its eventual destinations, the Book begins as a more personalized version of a venerable genre: an account of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Conventionally labeled an itinerarium, this type of writing traces its history back to at least 333 AD, when an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux composed a laconic account of his voyage (the Itinerarium Burdigalense or Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum). Based upon a Roman model of verbal road maps, Christian itineraria tend to be terse records, providing some information on how to get to Jerusalem and a catalog of sites to behold once you arrive. Visited locations and encountered objects are tied through scriptural citation to whatever biblical event gives the building, well, town, mountain, altar its significance. Thus the Pilgrim of Bordeaux writes of some artifacts in Jerusalem:

Here is also the corner of an exceeding high tower, where our Lord ascended and the tempter said to Him, 'If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence' ... There is a great corner-stone, of which it was said, 'The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.'

Even when a fragment or a crumbled ruin is all that remains of the structure that provided the setting for a biblical story, that narrative nonetheless comes fully to present life by invocation: an “exceeding high tower” suddenly looms in a place where a pilgrim beholds its only extant corner. The bodies that once moved across these stages might have perished or risen heavenward long ago, but stones abide the silent centuries to offer lasting testament to the histories that unfolded nearby.

To journey through holy land is to traverse sacred time: you behold the rock of Calvary, and there you meditate upon the Passion as if Jesus and the two thieves were still hanging on their crosses. Pilgrimage is a kind of time travel, the terminus of which is absolution at the site of the resurrection. You might partake of some side excursions (Jericho, the river Jordan, Bethlehem), you might immediately return home, but in a way you are forever stuck at that place of revelation and redemption. There is no compelling story to tell afterwards, because the narrative was never about you in the first place. The Holy Land persists in its timelessness as the traveler (whose soul is now similarly wrenched from the temporal) quickly ends the tale. Pilgrimage is a one-way movement: even if the sketch of a homeward journey is provided, doctrinally speaking there is no return from Palestine.

Although known for its peregrination without certain destination, the Book of John Mandeville likewise almost becomes transfixed here in the middle of the world.

The Rock in the Myd of the Erthe
Mandeville gives us several options for arriving in the Holy Land, and some unanticipated sights to enjoy along the way – including that princess in dragon form and the city sunk below the earth for its necrophiliac resident. I want to skip ahead to Jerusalem for a moment, however, and linger – just as Mandeville does – at the very center of the center. This would be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, within which is enclosed the rock of Calvary, upon which was set the cross of Christ, atop which Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac, under which was found in a crack the head of Adam. A sign in Latin and in Greek announces that we have arrived “in the myd of the erthe” (38). Ground zero – the middle of the middle – is to be found nearby, “in the myddel of this cherche,” within a “compass” [circle] drawn by Joseph of Arimathea: here was placed the corpse of “Oure Lord” after he was taken down from the cross: “And that compass, men seyn, hit is in the myddel of the world” (39).

The pivot of the earth, Jerusalem is central geographically, theologically, and historically – a place where the literal and the metaphorical are indistinguishable, where sign is thing. We find ourselves within the Holy Land, within the walls of Jerusalem, within the church of the tomb, within Joseph’s compass: within, that is, a series of ever shrinking concentric circles that announce, once we can get to no more medial a site, that we have arrived at the locus where time and space are one. For just as we can move no further geographically, so temporality itself seems arrested: we are witnesses with Mandeville of events that occurred thirteen or fourteen hundred years ago, a living history caught in an eternal loop. Thus not only can we glimpse the red stains of Christ’s blood upon the mortice that secured his cross, but the chains that held him to a pillar when he was scourged. Not far from Joseph’s compass was the cross itself entombed, placed “under a roche” by Jews. Almost every step of this sacrosanct expanse brings to mind a story from the Bible, brings sacred narrative into the present to unfold once more. The center of the earth would seem a place of profound stasis, inscribed with a history so holy that the very stones retain its crimson imprint.

Except that these precincts are inhabited, and not by Joseph of Arimathea or Adam or Abraham or the Virgin Mary: “This lond of Jerusalem hath y-be in hond of diverse nacions, as Jewes, Cananeus, Assirienes, Perces, Medoynes, Massydoyns, Grecis, Romayns, Cristen men, Sarasyns, Barbaryns, and Turkes, and many other naciouns with hem” (37). The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is Constantinople’s addition to the Levantine landscape. A Muslim Sultan now owns the building, and he has built a fence around the tomb of Jesus to prevent pilgrims from chiseling souvenir pebbles. Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin, and other crusaders who held but could not keep the city are buried nearby. The cross of Christ and the nails that secured him to its wood were long ago discovered and carried away, the latter now possessed by “paynems and Sarasyns.” Within the church that has engulfed this sacred region in stone, the priests who say the masses do not use a familiar liturgy. Rocks and tombs that once held secrets – subterranean or stonework spaces that had enclosed bodies and relics and kept them transfixed – these have all been opened, emptied. In the middle of the world, history carries on: clergy go about their business indifferent to Roman changes to the mass, colonizers and tourists of various faiths come and go, the Sultan who owns the place remodels with his own architectural additions.

“The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

To quote Wallace Stevens on “silent Palestine” is to go too far: Mandeville never implies that this sacred dominion where the Passion unfolded is as empty as that compass marking “the myddel of the world.”

And yet …