Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and
even xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word
looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their
own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and
cultures they meant to describe. These authors--William of Rubruck among
the Mongols, "John Mandeville" cataloguing the world's diverse wonders,
Geraldus Cambrensis describing the manners of the twelfth-century Welsh,
and Jean de Joinville in his account of the various Saracens encountered
on the Seventh Crusade--display an uncanny ability to see and understand
from the perspective of the very strangers who are their subjects.
Khanmohamadi elaborates on a distinctive late medieval ethnographic
poetics marked by both a profound openness to alternative perspectives
and voices and a sense of the formidable threat of such openness to
Europe's governing religious and cultural orthodoxies. That we can hear
the voices of medieval Europe's others in these narratives in spite of
such orthodoxies allows us to take full measure of the productive forces
of disorientation and destabilization at work on these early
ethnographic writers.
Poised at the intersection of medieval studies, anthropology, and visual
culture, In Light of Another's Word is an innovative departure from
each, extending existing studies of medieval travel writing into the
realm of poetics, of ethnographic form into the premodern realm, and of
early visual culture into the realm of ethnographic encounter.
