In Light of Another’s Word

Shirin A. Khanmohamadi’s study of medieval ethnographic writing is the latest contribution to an ever-expanding field of research on medieval travel writing, constructions of otherness, and the provocative connections between postcolonial approaches and medieval literature. Her book makes a distinctive contribution to this field by taking as its subject medieval ethnographic descriptions, by Gerald of Wales on the Welsh, William of Rubruck on the Mongols, Jean de Joinville on Muslim ‘Saracens’ and by Mandeville in his descriptions of the world’s many and diverse religious communities and their practices. In her close reading of this set of of texts, Khanmohamadi finds a ‘distinctive late medieval ethnographic poetics’: that is, an ability on the part of these writers to step into the world view of the ‘other’ people they set out to describe. She argues that this poetics should draw our attention to late medieval writers’ openness to difference, and their interest in exposing, and even confronting, the faultlines of alterity between their own cultures and those described in their ethnographic accounts

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Ethnography · Field (mathematics · Linguistics · Literature · Medieval Literature · Medieval studies · Middle Ages · Poetics · Poetry · Reading (process · Welsh · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy