International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2006 Abstracts

Medieval travelers, borrowing from Roman accounts, transmitted the practice of categorizing the peoples they met based on physical and social customs, developing “races” of men later referred to as the monstrous races.  Verbal accounts, accompanied at times with illustrations of these races, along with depictions of these peoples on period maps shows a great deal of continuity between medieval travelers and the first Europeans to describe the Americas.  These views were promulgated in literary works and became part of the European imagination of the Other.  As medieval Westerners traveled and encountered other peoples, they were faced with the choice of either accepting cultural and physical difference as part of a religious view that all of mankind could be saved, or forcing other peoples into positions of non-humanity.  This paper is devoted to visual and verbal descriptions of other peoples, monstrous and otherwise, in the travels of Marco Polo, John Mandeville, William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, the letter and legends of Prester John, and the encyclopedias of Isidore of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais and Bartholomaeus Anglicus.  These travel accounts are read alongside medieval theological debates by Augustine, Peter of Auvergne, and Albert the Great, all of whom took up the question of how one can know whether a being is a human or not.  Of inherent interest in these medieval texts is to what extent they espouse the notion of a universal brotherhood of believers, which would allow for conversion and assimilation.  At what point does the medieval notion of universalism, on tenuous ground when humans are described as monstrous, give way to biological notions of superiority?