Proximate others and distant selves: Writing culture in late medieval Europe

This dissertation examines the late medieval European discourse of ethnography, taking as its point of origin the striking reemergence, after over a thousand years of absence, of the ethnographic monograph with Gerald of Wales' Descriptio Kambriae (Description of Wales) in 1194. I target two especially productive contact zones of anthropological activity for the high Middle Ages: the "Far West" of the Celtic periphery, site of an ever-penetrating Anglo-Norman conquest from the eleventh century forward, and "the East" of Asia and the Holy Land, destinations of numerous European missionaries and pilgrims in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In order to show the generic diversity of late medieval inquiries into the manners and customs of alien societies or the boundaries between barbarism and civility, each geographic section couples a self-styled "scientific" text of cultural observation and description with a literary one of no less ethnographic value: in the case of the Celtic West, I pair Gerald of Wales' Descriptio Kambriae with Marie de France's Celtic translatio in the Lais, while in the East, I read William of Rubruck's detailed Itinerarium (Journey) to Mongolia alongside the fabulous Travels of John Mandeville. I argue for a critical disjunction at the heart of Europe's earliest anthropological writings. On the one hand, twelfth century depictions of the Celtic peoples of the Occidental Fringe proceed according to a colonialist logic that either devalues native culture as essentially primitive, or poses the urgency of its "salvage" against forces of acculturation and extinction. On the other hand, the Eastern ethnographies of my study display a poetics of intersubjectivity rather than, as might be expected, one of Orientalist objectification in their insistence upon an uncanny proximity and coextensiveness between Latin Christians and their would-be Eastern "others," the various pagans, Nestorians, Muslims, and Buddhists of medieval Asia and the Holy Land.